Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.Comment: Paper accepted at 25th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 1-11, 201

The quality of sustainability and the nature of open source software

The aim is to categorise Open Source Software as a commons based production process and resource. The definition of the commons is always accompanied by the doubt about its sustainability, the so-called "tragedy of the commons." Therefore it is worth to have a closer look on Open Source and why a "tragedy" does not appear

Benefits realisation management: panacea or false dawn?

Benefits Realisation Management (BRM) is becoming an increasingly important aspect of project and programme management. However, commentators have observed that the practice of BRM is often flawed, and have made suggestions as to how practice might be improved. This paper is concerned with the reasons why the implementation of BRM might not be straightforward, by focusing on the underlying assumptions. It will approach the issue by drawing on the author's experience from the 1990s and 2000s in working in the management of government-funded regeneration programmes in the UK. In this field there was a rigid benefits management framework, although it precedes the development of BRM. The paper will argue that there are important underlying conceptual issues in benefits management which have practical implications and need to be recognised in the development of theory for BRM

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires