Sustainability Forecasting for Apache Incubator Projects Likang Yin Zhuangzhi Chen DECAL and CS Department College of Information Engineering University of California, Davis Zhejiang University of Technology
[email protected] [email protected] Qi Xuan Vladimir Filkov College of Information Engineering DECAL and CS Department Zhejiang University of Technology University of California, Davis
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 80% of OSS projects become abandoned over time, especially the Although OSS development is very popular, ultimately more than smaller and younger projects [45]. Certainly not all OSS projects 80% of OSS projects fail. Identifying the factors associated with are meant to be widely used or even to persist beyond a college OSS success can help in devising interventions when a project semester. However, even the large, popular OSS software, widely takes a downturn. OSS success has been studied from a variety of used in our daily lives and by fortune 500 companies, started out angles, more recently in empirical studies of large numbers of di- as small projects. Thus, from a societal perspective it is important verse projects, using proxies for sustainability, e.g., internal metrics to ask: Why do some nascent OSS projects succeed and become related to productivity and external ones, related to community pop- self-sustaining while others do not [41]? And can the latter be ularity. The internal socio-technical structure of projects has also helped? been shown important, especially their dynamics. This points to To aid developer communities to build and maintain sustainable another angle on evaluating software success, from the perspective OSS projects, nonprofit organizations like the Apache Software of self-sustaining and self-governing communities.