Survival and activity of OSS projects

This paper is about open source software projects’ activity and the characteristics of different categories of contributors. Our empirical analysis draws on a large sample of OSS projects registered at the Sourceforge website. For each project we have information about individual contributors such as skills and tasks assigned. Key variables at the project level are the number of project members or internal contributors (i.e., people who have subscribed to the project), the number of external contributors (project openness), the overall skill combination of contributors, the number of different intended audiences (e.g., developers and end users), and various measures of activity (i.e. feature requests, bugs and patches closed over time). We performed an econometric analysis to estimate the contribution of skills and openness to projects’ survival and activity.