  A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit")
that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. An author's
commit frequency describes how often that author commits. Knowing the
distribution of all commit frequencies is a fundamental part of understanding
software development processes. This paper presents a detailed quantitative
analysis of commit frequencies in open-source software development. The
analysis is based on a large sample of open source projects, and presents the
overall distribution of commit frequencies. We analyze the data to show the
differences between authors and projects by project size; we also includes a
comparison of successful and non successful projects and we derive an activity
indicator from these analyses. By measuring a fundamental dimension of
programming we help improve software development tools and our understanding of
software development. We also validate some fundamental assumptions about
software development.
