Understanding the Popularity of Packages in Maven Ecosystem
Sadman Sakib, Muhammad Asaduzzaman, Curtis Bright, Cole Morgan · 2025
The widespread availability of open-source software packages in ecosystems like Maven has significantly improved developer productivity by promoting the reuse of pre-existing packages. However, the vast number of available packages often poses challenges in selecting suitable packages. This study investigates the role of popularity metrics in evaluating Maven packages by analyzing 103,315 packages, each at least two years old. Metrics were collected from the Maven Neo4j dataset and GitHub repositories to examine their relationships and importance in determining package popularity. Our analysis reveals strong interdependencies among community-driven GitHub metrics, such as stars, forks, pull requests, and contributors, which highlight their role in defining package popularity. Conversely, Maven-specific metrics, including dependencies and vulnerabilities, showed weak correlations with GitHub-based popularity indicators. Our analysis identified license status, commits count, presence of README files, and usages as the most significant predictors of package popularity, while vulnerabilities had limited statistical impact. These findings underscore the complementary nature of technical and community-driven metrics in assessing package popularity and provide actionable insights for developers and researchers to better evaluate and select open-source software packages.