Investigating Success of Open Source Software Projects: A Social Network Perspective

To date, numerous open source projects are hosted on many online repositories, reflecting the popularity of open source projects. While some of these projects are active and thriving, some of them are either languishing or showing no development activities at all. This phenomenon thus begs the important question of what are the influential factors that affect the success of open source projects. In a quest to deepen our understanding of the evolution of open source projects, this research aims to analyze the survival of open source projects by using the theoretical lens of social network analysis. Based on extensive analyses of empirical data collected from online open source repositories, we study the impact of the communication patterns of the development teams on the outcomes of these projects, while accounting for project-specific characteristics. Using panel data analysis, we find significant impacts of communication patterns on project outcomes over the long term.