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Software metrics have many uses, e.g., defect prediction, effort estimation, and benchmarking an organization against peers and industry standards. In all these cases, metrics may depend on the context, such as the programming language. Here we aim to investigate if the distributions of commonly used metrics do, in fact, vary with six context factors: application domain, programming language, age, lifespan, the number of changes, and the number of downloads. For this preliminary study we select 320 nontrivial software systems from Source Forge. These software systems are randomly sampled from nine popular application domains of Source Forge. We calculate 39 metrics commonly used to assess software maintainability for each software system and use Kruskal Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U test to determine if there are significant differences among the distributions with respect to each of the six context …