  Open source software (OSS) is essential for modern society and, while
substantial research has been done on individual (typically central) projects,
only a limited understanding of the periphery of the entire OSS ecosystem
exists. For example, how are the tens of millions of projects in the periphery
interconnected through. technical dependencies, code sharing, or knowledge
flow? To answer such questions we: a) create a very large and frequently
updated collection of version control data in the entire FLOSS ecosystems named
World of Code (WoC), that can completely cross-reference authors, projects,
commits, blobs, dependencies, and history of the FLOSS ecosystems and b)
provide capabilities to efficiently correct, augment, query, and analyze that
data. Our current WoC implementation is capable of being updated on a monthly
basis and contains over 18B Git objects. To evaluate its research potential and
to create vignettes for its usage, we employ WoC in conducting several research
tasks. In particular, we find that it is capable of supporting trend
evaluation, ecosystem measurement, and the determination of package usage. We
expect WoC to spur investigation into global properties of OSS development
leading to increased resiliency of the entire OSS ecosystem. Our infrastructure
facilitates the discovery of key technical dependencies, code flow, and social
networks that provide the basis to determine the structure and evolution of the
relationships that drive FLOSS activities and innovation.
