Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

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Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail Jailton Coelho, Marco Tulio Valente {jailtoncoelho, mtov}@dcc.ufmg.br ESEC/FSE 2017

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“Software is eating the world and open source is eating software.” 2

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Introduction ● Most software produced nowadays depend on OSS ● OSS are being created at speeds never seen before 64M repositories 3 19M users

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Why do open source projects fail? 4

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Research Questions ● RQ1: Why do open source projects fail? ● RQ2: What is the importance of open source maintenance practices? ● RQ3: What is the impact of project failures? ● RQ4: How do developers try to overcome projects failure? 5

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Dataset ● Top-5,000 GitHub projects by stars ● 618 projects: ○ 542 projects without commits in the last year ○ 76 projects declared as unmaintained in their READMEs 6

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Results 7

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RQ1: Why do open source projects fail? 8

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Survey Participants ● Individual accounts: project owners ● Organization accounts: principal contributor 9

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Survey Questionnaire ● Do you agree that the project is unmaintained? ● If Yes: a. Why did you stop maintaining the project? b. Did you receive any funding to maintain the project? c. Do you have plans to reactivate the project? 10

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Participation Data ● 408 emails sent ● 118 answers (response rate of 29%) ● 36 answers from the READMEs 11

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Survey Answers ● Do you agree that the project is unmaintained? ○ Yes: 86% No: 14% ● Do you have plans to reactivate the project? ○ Yes: 15% No: 85% 12

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Why did you stop maintaining the project? ● The project was usurped by competitor (30 answers) 13 “The project no longer makes sense. Apple has built technical and legal alternatives which I believe are satisfactory”.

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Why did you stop maintaining the project? ● Lack of time of the main contributor (27 answers) 14 “I was the only maintainer and there was a lot of feature requests and I didn't have enough time”.

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Why did you stop maintaining the project? ● The projects is completed (17 answers): ○ It is stable and works as expected ○ Do not need changes 15 “Sometimes, you build something, and sometimes, it's completed. Like if you built a building, at some point in time it is finished, it achieved its goals...”.

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Combining the Survey Answers ● A project has failed when: ○ It is unmaintained ○ It is not considered completed ○ Maintainers do not have plans to reactivate ● 104 projects that have failed 16

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Our Definition of Failure ● The project has been abandoned (or deprecated) ● The project may have been important to developers and users before being deprecated 17

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Reason Projects Usurped by competitor 27 Obsolete 20 Lack of time 18 Lack of interest 18 Outdated technologies 14 Low maintainability 7 Conflicts among developers 3 Legal problems 2 Acquisition 1 Why do open source projects fail? 18

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RQ2: What is the importance of following best open source maintenance practices? 19

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Design ● We selected four groups of 104 projects (among top-5k): ○ Failed ○ Top ○ Bottom ○ Random 20 by stars

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Open source maintenance practices 1. README 2. License 3. Home Page 4. Continuous Integration 5. Contributing Guidelines 6. Issue Template 7. Code of Conduct 8. Pull Request Template 21

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22 Maintenance Practice Failed(%) Top(%) Bottom(%) Random(%) README 99 100 100 100 License 61 88 60 73 Home Page 58 87 52 60 Continuous Integration 27 68 41 45 Contributing Guidelines 16 72 13 32 Issue Template 0 15 2 5 Code of Conduct 0 13 0 2 Pull Request Template 0 3 0 0 Fail vs (Top, Bottom, and Random)

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23 Maintenance Practice Failed(%) Top(%) Bottom(%) Random(%) README 99 100 100 100 License 61 88 60 73 Home Page 58 87 52 60 Continuous Integration 27 68 41 45 Contributing Guidelines 16 72 13 32 Issue Template 0 15 2 5 Code of Conduct 0 13 0 2 Pull Request Template 0 3 0 0 Fail vs (Top, Bottom, and Random)

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24 Maintenance Practice Failed(%) Top(%) Bottom(%) Random(%) README 99 100 100 100 License 61 88 60 73 Home Page 58 87 52 60 Continuous Integration 27 68 41 45 Contributing Guidelines 16 72 13 32 Issue Template 0 15 2 5 Code of Conduct 0 13 0 2 Pull Request Template 0 3 0 0 Fail vs (Top, Bottom, and Random)

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RQ3: What is the impact of the project failures? 25

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Design ● Opened Issues and Pull Requests (104 failed projects) ● Over 4,700 opened issues ● Around 300 opened pull requests 26

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Assumption ● Negative impact of an abandoned project includes: ○ bugs and enhancements that will not be considered ○ pull request that will not be implemented 27

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Impact of the project failures 28

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RQ4: How do developers try to overcome the projects failure? 29

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Design ● We manually analyzed over 1,600 issues ● In 32 issues developers discuss about the project’s status ● Examples: ○ Is this project dead? ○ Is this project maintained? ○ Is development of this ongoing? 30

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How do developers try to overcome the projects failure? ● Moving to an organization account (5 projects) ● Include new core developers (5 projects) ● Transfer the project to new maintainers (3 projects) ● Owners suggested migrate to another project (19 projects) 31

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Take-Away Message ● Top-5 most common reasons for the failure of OSS: ○ project was usurped by competitor ○ project became functionally obsolete ○ lack of time of the main contributor ○ lack of interest of the main contributor ○ project is based on outdated technologies 32

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Take-Away Message ● Failed vs Top projects ○ Contributing guidelines (16% vs 72%) ○ Continuous integration (27% vs 68%) ○ License (61% vs 88%) 33

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Thank you! 34 Jailton Coelho, Marco Tulio Valente {jailtoncoelho, mtov}@dcc.ufmg.br