Related papers: How Early Participation Determines Long-Term Susta…

Open source software projects evolve thanks to a group of volunteers that help in their development. Thus, the success of these projects depends on their ability to attract (and keep) developers. We believe the openness of a project, i.e.,…

Open source projects depend on newcomers who stay, yet most leave after a single contribution. Contribution events such as Google Summer of Code, LFX Mentorship, Hacktoberfest, and 24 Pull Requests attract thousands of newcomers each year,…

Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers,…

Open-source software (OSS) projects depend on community engagement (CE) for longevity. However, CE's quantifiable impact on project dynamics and lifespan is underexplored. Objectives: This study defines CE in OSS, identifies key metrics,…

Context: GitHub hosts an impressive number of high-quality OSS projects. However, selecting "the right tool for the job" is a challenging task, because we do not have precise information about those high-quality projects. Objective: In this…

Open-source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational,…

Collaborative consensus-finding is an integral element of many Web services and greatly determines the quality of information, content, and products that are available through the Web. That also means that the dynamics of democratic…

Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and…

Software developed on public platform is a source of data that can be used to make predictions about those projects. While the individual developing activity may be random and hard to predict, the developing behavior on project level can be…

Open Source Software (OSS) sustainability relies on newcomers transitioning to core contributors, but this pipeline is broken, with most newcomers becoming inactive after initial contributions. Open Source Software for Social Good (OSS4SG)…

While many forms of financial support are currently available, there are still many complaints about inadequate financing from software maintainers. In May 2019, GitHub, the world's most active social coding platform, launched the Sponsor…

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…

Many software developers rely on open source software for developing their applications and writing their source codes. Measuring an independent project's overall productivity is still an open problem for many technology companies. In this…

Scientific open-source software (Sci-OSS) projects are critical for advancing research, yet sustaining these projects long-term remains a major challenge. This paper explores the sustainability of Sci-OSS hosted on GitHub, focusing on two…

Context: To attract, onboard, and retain any new-comer in Open Source Software (OSS) projects is vital to their livelihood. Recent studies conclude that OSS projects risk failure due to abandonment and poor participation of newcomers.…

GitHub Sponsors, launched in 2019, enables donations to individual open source software (OSS) developers. Financial support for OSS maintainers and developers is a major issue in terms of sustaining OSS projects, and the ability to donate…

Many OSS projects join foundations such as Apache, Eclipse, and OSGeo, to aid their immediate plans and improve long-term prospects by getting governance advice, incubation support, and community-building mechanisms. But foundations differ…

Gender diversity in open source software development continues to be a topic of growing interest among researchers, practitioners, and organizations. To date, research has revealed disparities in participation between developers on the…

Financial sustainability is vital for open-source software, yet systematic research on funding remains limited. GitHub Sponsors, launched in 2019 as a direct developer-to-developer funding model, lacks bulk API access, hindering large-scale…

Due to the voluntary nature of open source software, it can be hard to find a developer to work on a particular task. For example, some issue reports may be too cumbersome and unexciting for someone to volunteer to do them, yet these issue…