Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

Abstract

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.

Paper accepted at 25th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 1-11, 2017

References in corpus (4)

• Understanding the Factors that Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories
• Why We Refactor? Confessions of GitHub Contributors
• A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors
• Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

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• Interpersonal Trust in OSS: Exploring Dimensions of Trust in GitHub Pull Requests
• The downside of heterogeneity: How established relations counteract systemic adaptivity in tasks assignments
• GitQ- Towards Using Badges as Visual Cues for GitHub Projects
• Building the MSR Tool Kaiaulu: Design Principles and Experiences
• Which Is Better For Reducing Outdated and Vulnerable Dependencies: Pinning or Floating?
• The Death Spiral of Open Source Projects: A Post-Mortem Analysis of Pull Request Workflow Dynamics
• Sources of Underproduction in Open Source Software
• How Reliable Are FOSS Popularity Metrics? Analyzing the Effort Required for Spoofing Common Software Popularity Metrics