# On the abandonment and survival of open source projects: An empirical investigation

## TL;DR

This study empirically investigates open source project abandonment and survival, revealing that a significant portion of projects are abandoned but can be rescued by new core developers motivated by personal use, despite facing social and logistical challenges.

## Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on project abandonment and survival, highlighting the role of new core developers and identifying motivations and barriers in maintaining open source projects.

## Key findings

- 16% of projects were abandoned
- 41% of abandoned projects were revived by new core developers
- Main motivations include personal use and social factors

## Abstract

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) their own usage of the systems is the main motivation to contribute to such projects; (iii) human and social factors played a key role when making these contributions; and (iv) lack of time and the difficulty to obtain push access to the repositories are the main barriers faced by them. Conclusions: Project abandonment is a reality even in large open source projects and our work enables a better understanding of such risks, as well as highlights ways in avoiding them.