TY - GEN
T1 - Is it all lost? A study of inactive open source projects
AU - Khondhu, Jymit
AU - Capiluppi, Andrea
AU - Stol, Klaas Jan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Inactive projects
KW - Maintainability index
KW - Open source
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84914172715
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-38928-3_5
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-38928-3_5
M3 - Conference proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:84914172715
SN - 9783642389276
T3 - IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
SP - 61
EP - 79
BT - Open Source Software
A2 - Petrinja, Etiel
A2 - Succi, Giancarlo
A2 - El Ioini, Nabil
A2 - Sillitti, Alberto
PB - Springer New York LLC
T2 - 9th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Software, OSS 2013
Y2 - 25 June 2013 through 28 June 2013
ER -