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.
Ye and Kishida @cite_3 describe a study to understand what motivates developers to engage in open source development. Using as case study the GIMP project (GNU Image Manipulation Program) they argue that learning is the major driving force that motivates people to get involved in open source projects. However, we do not known if this find applies to the new generation of open source systems, developed using platforms as GitHub. Eghbal @cite_11 reports on the risks and challenges to maintain modern open source projects. She argues that open source plays a key role in the digital infrastructure that sustain our society today. But unlike physical infrastructure, like bridges and roads, open source still lacks a reliable and sustainable source of funding. concluded that nearly two-thirds of a sample of 133 popular GitHub projects depend on one or two developers to survive @cite_17 .
@cite_17 @cite_3 @cite_11
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Truck Factor (TF) is a metric proposed by the agile community as a tool to identify concentration of knowledge in software development environments. It states the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In other words, TF helps to measure how prepared is a project to deal with developer turnover. Despite its clear relevance, few studies explore this metric. Altogether there is no consensus about how to calculate it, and no supporting evidence backing estimates for systems in the wild. To mitigate both issues, we propose a novel (and automated) approach for estimating TF-values, which we execute against a corpus of 133 popular project in GitHub. We later survey developers as a means to assess the reliability of our results. Among others, we find that the majority of our target systems (65 ) have TF ≤ 2. Surveying developers from 67 target systems provides confidence towards our estimates; in 84 of the valid answers we collect, developers agree or partially agree that the TF's authors are the main authors of their systems; in 53 we receive a positive or partially positive answer regarding our estimated truck factors. An Open Source Software (OSS) project is unlikely to be successful unless there is an accompanied community that provides the platform for developers and users to collaborate. Members of such communities are volunteers whose motivation to participate and contribute is of essential importance to the success of OSS projects. In this paper, we aim to create an understanding of what motivates people to participate in OSS communities. We theorize that learning is one of the motivational forces. Our theory is grounded in the learning theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation, and is supported by analyzing the social structure of OSS communities and the co-evolution between OSS systems and communities. We also discuss practical implications of our theory for creating and maintaining sustainable OSS communities as well as for software engineering research and education.