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A common problem that management faces in software companies is the high instability of their staff. In libre (free, open source) software projects, the permanence of developers is also an open issue, with the potential of causing problems amplified by the self-organizing nature that most of them exhibit. Hence, human resources in libre software projects are even more difficult to manage: developers are in most cases not bound by a contract and, in addition, there is not a real management structure concerned about this problem. This raises some interesting questions with respect to the composition of development teams in libre software projects, and how they evolve over time. There are projects lead by their original founders (some sort of “code gods”), while others are driven by several different developer groups over time (i.e. the project “regenerates” itself). In this paper, we propose a quantitative …