Great posting on O'Reilly Radar about authorship of open source software: Open Source Authorship.
"The 80/20 rule is actually only one of a specific type of numerical
relationships known generally as power laws. Much has been written
about power laws and their applicability to everything from linguistics
to hedge funds. Recently folks have been writing a lot about the power
law scaling of web logs and of the "long tail" of web businesses. Way
back in 1926, a statistician for MetLife named Alfred Lotka, published
a paper in which he observed that the productivity of scientific
authors also followed an power-law relationship. Put simply "Lotka's
Law" says that a few authors do most of the work, dragging along a long
tail of less productive authors." http://www.buildandtest.com/gap/dashboard/
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