Analysis of Survival of Open Source Projects: a Social Network Perspective

The popularity of open source is unassailable. It has been widely adopted for different purposes, including web servers, e-mail servers, operating systems, and programming languages. Although some open source projects, like Apache, Sendmail and Linux, have achieved extraordinary success, lots of projects are lackluster or with no developing activity at all. To deepen our understanding of open source projects, it is essential to explore the factors that have contributed to its success or failure. The objective of this research is to analyze the survival of open source projects from the social network perspective. In particular, we have studied the impact of the communication pattern of open source projects on the project success, defined in view of both the supply side (developers) and the demand side (end users), while incorporating control factors such as project-specific characteristics. Based on empirical data collected from SourceForge.net, a popular open source hosting web site, our results show that the communication pattern has significant impacts on the open source success