Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

TL;DR

This paper investigates why modern open source projects fail by analyzing survey data from maintainers of deprecated GitHub projects, highlighting key failure reasons and the impact of maintenance practices.

Contribution

It identifies nine main reasons for open source project failure and links specific maintenance practices to project success or failure.

Findings

Contributing guidelines and continuous integration are linked to project success.

Nine main failure reasons identified from maintainers' perspectives.

Developers employ various strategies to overcome project failure.

Abstract

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.