Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) projects are characterized by the ability to attract new project members and maintain an energetic project community. Building sustainable OSS projects from a nascent state requires effective project governance and socio-technical structure to be interleaved, in a complex and dynamic process. Although individual disciplines have studied each separately, little is known about how governance and software development work together in practice toward sustainability. Prior work has shown that many OSS projects experience large, episodic changes over short periods of time, which can propel them or drag them down. However, sustainable projects typically manage to come out unscathed from such changes, while others do not. The natural questions arise: Can we identify the back-and-forth between governance and socio-technical structure that lead to sustainability following episodic events? And, how about those that do not lead to sustainability? From a data set of social, technical, and policy digital traces from 262 sustainability-labeled ASF incubator projects, here we employ a large-scale empirical study to characterize episodic changes in socio-technical aspects measured by Change Intervals (CI), governance rules and regulations in a form of Institutional Statements (IS), and the temporal relationships between them. We find that sustainable projects during episodic changes can adapt themselves to institutional statements more efficiently, and that institutional discussions can lead to episodic changes intervals in socio-technical aspects of the projects, and vice versa. In practice, these results can provide timely guidance beyond socio-technical considerations, adding rules and regulations in the mix, toward a unified analytical framework for OSS project sustainability.

Open-source Software (OSS) has become a valuable resource in both industry and academia over the last few decades. Despite the innovative structures they develop to support the projects, OSS projects and their communities have complex needs and face risks such as getting abandoned. To manage the internal social dynamics and community evolution, OSS developer communities have started relying on written governance documents that assign roles and responsibilities to different community actors.To facilitate the study of the impact and effectiveness of formal governance documents on OSS projects and communities, we present a longitudinal dataset of 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects with GOVERNANCE.MD governance files. This dataset includes all commits made to the repository, all issues and comments created on GitHub, and all revisions made to the governance file. We hope its availability will foster more research interest in studying how OSS communities govern their projects and the impact of governance files on communities.

Open Source Software (OSS) is a major component of our digital infrastructure, yet more than 80% of such projects fail. Seeking less uncertainty, many OSS projects join established software communities, e.g., the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), with established rules and community support to guide projects toward sustainability. In their nascent stage, ASF projects are incubated in the ASF incubator (ASFI), which provides systematic mentorship toward long-term sustainability. Projects in ASFI eventually conclude their incubation by either graduating, if successful, or retiring, if not.

Recent work on open source sustainability shows that successful trajectories of projects in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI) can be predicted early on, using a set of socio-technical measures. Because OSS projects are socio-technical systems centered around code artifacts, we hypothesize that sustainable projects may exhibit different code and process patterns than unsustainable ones, and that those patterns can grow more apparent as projects evolve over time. Here we studied the code and coding processes of over 200 ASFI projects, and found that ASFI graduated projects have different patterns of code quality and complexity than retired ones. Likewise for the coding processes – e.g., feature commits or bug-fixing commits are correlated with project graduation success. We find that minor contributors and major contributors (who contribute <5%, respectively >=95% commits) associate with graduation outcomes, implying that having also developers who contribute fewer commits are important for a project’s success. This study provides evidence that OSS projects, especially nascent ones, can benefit from introspection and instrumentation using multidimensional modeling of the whole system, including code, processes, and code quality measures, and how they are interconnected over time.

Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored. In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.

Open Source Software success and sustainability is critically important for the digital infrastructure as OSS is used broadly and yet 83+% of such projects fail. To increase chances of success many projects join established software communities, e.g. the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), with clearly established rules and support. Specifically at ASF, projects that strive to join ASF and are at a nascent development stage are digitally housed in the ASF incubator (ASFI), which provides a mature governance environment and expert help toward long-term sustainability. Projects in ASFI eventually conclude their incubation by graduating, if successful on the path to sustainability. Otherwise, they get retired. In ASF, digital traces of developer activities for projects in ASFI are publicly available, together with monthly project status.Here we present a longitudinal dataset of developer coding and communication activities of 269 projects from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI). Each project in ASFI is evaluated while in incubation and is eventually "graduated" or "retired", a label indicating the project sustainability promise with respect to their technical development and community diversity. This extrinsically labeled dataset offers heretofore unavailable sustainability data of OSS project development under ASF regulations and governance. We hope its availability will foster more research interest in studying sustainability in OSS projects.

Although OSS development is very popular, ultimately more than 80% of OSS projects fail. Identifying the factors associated with OSS success can help in devising interventions when a project takes a downturn. OSS success has been studied from a variety of angles, more recently in empirical studies of large numbers of diverse projects, using proxies for sustainability, e.g., internal metrics related to productivity and external ones, related to community popularity. The internal socio-technical structure of projects has also been shown important, especially their dynamics. This points to another angle on evaluating software success, from the perspective of self-sustaining and self-governing communities.

In Open Source Software (OSS) projects, pre-built tools dominate DevOps-oriented pipelines. In practice, a multitude of configuration management, cloud-based continuous integration, and automated deployment tools exist, and often more than one for each task. Tools are adopted (and given up) by OSS projects regularly. Prior work has shown that some tool adoptions are preceded by discussions, and that tool adoptions can result in benefits to the project. But important questions remain: how do teams decide to adopt a tool? What is discussed before the adoption and for how long? And, what team characteristics are determinant of the adoption?

In the field of information science, how to represent the uncertain information is still an open issue. The negation is an important way to represent the information. However, existing negation method has the limitations since it can only be applied to the probability distributions. To address this issue, this paper proposed a novel method to obtain the negation of the basic probability assignment (BPA). Moreover, several methods are used to measure the uncertainty of the BPA after each negation process, and the connection between uncertain information and entropy is discussed in this paper. Furthermore, based on the negation, this paper proposed a method to measure the uncertainty of the BPA. Finally, numerical examples are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.