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On the abandonment and survival of open source projects: An empirical investigation by Avelino, Guilherme; Constantinou, Eleni; Valente, Marco Tulio; Serebrenik, Alexander is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

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Background: Evolution of open source projects frequently depends on a small number of core developers. The loss of such core developers might be detrimental for projects and even threaten their entire continuation. However, it is possible that new core developers assume the project maintenance and allow the project to survive. Aims: The objective of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on: 1) the frequency of project abandonment and survival, 2) the differences between abandoned and surviving projects, and 3) the motivation and difficulties faced when assuming an abandoned project. Method: We adopt a mixed-methods approach to investigate project abandonment and survival. We carefully select 1,932 popular GitHub projects and recover the abandoned and surviving projects, and conduct a survey with developers that have been instrumental in the survival of the projects. Results: We found that 315 projects (16%) were abandoned and 128 of these projects (41%) survived because of new core developers who assumed the project development. The survey indicates that (i) in most cases the new maintainers were aware of the project abandonment risks when they started to contribute; (ii) the

Author

Avelino, Guilherme; Constantinou, Eleni; Valente, Marco Tulio; Serebrenik, Alexander

Published

2019

Language

EN