There have already been a bunch of academics studying the version control histories of major open source projects, for example as a means to gain insight into why open source development "works" (i.e. is able to produce very high-quality software). One of the cool things about studying an OSS project is that everything is public, and the vast majority of the communication happens via an archived, digital medium: you can correlate VCS history with mailing list activity with bug tracker activity with website traffic logs, for example.
An example paper related to this idea is http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhanivonhippelusersupport... ("How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User Assistance", studying Apache)