Is It All Lost? A Study of Inactive Open Source Projects - Open Source Software: Quality Verification Access content directly
Conference Papers Year : 2013

Is It All Lost? A Study of Inactive Open Source Projects

Jymit Khondhu
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  • PersonId : 1001497
Andrea Capiluppi
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  • PersonId : 1001498
Klaas-Jan Stol
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  • PersonId : 1001499

Abstract

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.
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hal-01467582 , version 1 (14-02-2017)

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Jymit Khondhu, Andrea Capiluppi, Klaas-Jan Stol. Is It All Lost? A Study of Inactive Open Source Projects. 9th Open Source Software (OSS), Jun 2013, Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia. pp.61-79, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-38928-3_5⟩. ⟨hal-01467582⟩
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