posted on 2013-07-02, 10:46authored byJymit Khondhu, Andrea Capiluppi, Klaas-Jan Stol
Open Source Software (OSS) proponents suggest that when
developers lose interest in their project, their last duty is to “hand it off
to a competent successor.” However, the mechanisms of such a hand-off
are not clear, or widely known among OSS developers. As a result, many
OSS projects, after a certain long period of evolution, stop evolving, in
fact becoming “inactive” or “abandoned” projects. This paper presents
an analysis of the population of projects contained within one of the
largest OSS repositories available (SourceForge.net), in order to describe
how projects abandoned by their developers can be identified, and to
discuss the attributes and characteristics of these inactive projects. In
particular, the paper attempts to differentiate projects that experienced
maintainability issues from those that are inactive for other reasons, in
order to be able to correlate common characteristics to the “failure” of
these projects.
History
Publication
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Open Source Systems: IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology;pp.61-79
Publisher
Springer
Note
peer-reviewed
Other Funding information
SFI
Rights
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com