Determinants of Survival of Open Source Software: An Empirical Study
Shuo Chen · Academy of Information and Management Sciences journal · 2010
ABSTRACT Open Source Software (OSS) has gained notable importance and popularity among users in recent years. This paper uses data of more than 20,000 OSS projects over a 5-year period to investigate the determinants of Open Source Software survival. The results of logistic regressions show that OSS survival probability is positively correlated with general user interest, intensive user interest, and developer effort, but negatively correlated with the restrictiveness of license. Further investigation of the relationships among the determinants indicates that the interest of intensive users has a persistent positive impact on developer effort, while the interest of general users only has a short-term positive impact. It is also shown that projects on Software Development and System Administration have higher probability of survival than projects on other topics. INTRODUCTION Open Source Software (OSS) is a new mechanism for creating and developing innovative technologies. The source code of open source software is made freely available so that users can access, modify, and redistribute it. One example of open source software is the Linux operating system. Unlike its rival operating systems, such as Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris, Linux is free in the sense that the source code of Linux is available for downloading from the Internet without charge. The widespread adoption of OSS by firms and organizations has generated academic interests in understanding various aspects of this phenomenon. One observation is that a large proportion of the projects in the OSS community are inactive. It is important to find out why some projects flourish while a larger number of other projects fail. Past studies on success of OSS include Lerner and Tirole (2002, 2005), Stewart, Ammeter, and Maruping (2006), and Subramaniam, Sen, and Nelson (2009). However, no studies have examined the determinants of survival probability of open source software by comparing survived and failed OSS projects. In this paper we use logistic regressions to study the determinants of the probability of an OSS project staying active over the five-year period between 2004 and 2009. We find that restrictive license negatively affects OSS survival, particularly for projects about Internet technology. It is shown in the paper that OSS survival is positively correlated with general user interest, intensive user interest, and developer effort. On further investigation of the relationships among the determinants, we find that the interest of intensive users has a persistent positive impact on developer effort, while the interest of general users only has a short-term positive impact on developer effort. The results show that projects on Software Development and System Administration have higher probability of surviving than projects on other topics. Further analysis shows that projects on Software Development attract more developer effort and general user interest, while projects on System Administration attract the most intensive user interest. This paper contributes to the literature in two main aspects: First, this paper is the first to use logistic regression techniques to study the determinants of survival, analyzing information of both the survived and the failed OSS projects. Second, using large dataseis collected at two points in time over a 5-year period is novel. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature. Section 3 describes the data. Section 4 presents the methods and empirical results. Section 5 concludes. LITERATURE REVIEW The literature has explored the factors that contribute to OSS success including developer effort, user interest, license type, technology, ideology, and sponsorship. Stewart, Ammeter, and Maruping (2006) find that attracting developer input and user interest is essential for OSS project success. They show that characteristics of OSS projects including license and type of sponsorship may affect developer motivation and utility to users. …