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.
This chapter surveys a sample of empirical studies of Open Source Software (OSS) evolution. According to these, the classical findings in proprietary software evolution, such as Lehman’s laws of software evolution, might need to be revised, at least in part, to account for the OSS observations. The book chapter summarises what appears to be the empirical status of each of Lehman’s laws with respect to OSS and highlights the threats to validity that frequently emerge in this type of research. Open source projects rely on collaboration of members from all around the world using web technologies like GitHub and Gerrit. This mixture of people with a wide range of backgrounds including minorities like women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities may increase the risk of offensive and destroying behaviours in the community, potentially leading affected project members to leave towards a more welcoming and friendly environment. To counter these effects, open source projects increasingly are turning to codes of conduct, in an attempt to promote their expectations and standards of ethical behaviour. In this first of its kind empirical study of codes of conduct in open source software projects, we investigated the role, scope and influence of codes of conduct through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis, supported by interviews with practitioners. We found that the top codes of conduct are adopted by hundreds to thousands of projects, while all of them share 5 common dimensions.