Who Will Stop Contributing to OSS Projects? Predicting Company Turnover Based on Initial Behavior
Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no longer only developed by volunteers. Instead, many organizations, from early-stage startups to large global enterprises, actively participate in many well-known projects. The survival and success of OSS projects rely on long-term contributors, who have extensive experience and knowledge. While prior literature has explored volunteer turnover in OSS, there is a paucity of research on company turnover in OSS ecosystems. Given the intensive involvement of companies in OSS and the different nature of corporate contributors vis-a-vis volunteers, it is important to investigate company turnover in OSS projects. This study first explores the prevalence and characteristics of companies that discontinue contributing to OSS projects, and then develops models to predict companies’ turnover. Based on a study of the Linux kernel, we analyze the early-stage behavior of 1,322 companies that have contributed to the project. We find that approximately 12% of companies discontinue contributing each year; one-sixth of those used to be core contributing companies (those that ranked in the top 20% by commit volume). Furthermore, withdrawing companies tend to have a lower intensity and scope of contributions, make primarily perfective changes, collaborate less, and operate on a smaller scale. We propose a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) deep learning model based on these indicators to predict whether companies will discontinue. The evaluation results show that the model achieves an AUC metric of .76 and an accuracy of .71. We evaluated the model in two other OSS projects, Rust and OpenStack, and the performance remains stable.
Tue 24 JunDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
16:00 - 17:40 | MSR 2Journal First / Ideas, Visions and Reflections / Research Papers / Demonstrations at Cosmos 3C Chair(s): DongGyun Han Royal Holloway, University of London | ||
16:00 10mTalk | Introducing Repository Stability Ideas, Visions and Reflections Giuseppe Destefanis Brunel University of London, Silvia Bartolucci UCL, Daniel Graziotin University of Hohenheim, Rumyana Neykova Brunel University London, Marco Ortu University of Cagliari Pre-print | ||
16:10 20mTalk | Scientific Open-Source Software Is Less Likely To Become Abandoned Than One Might Think! Lessons from Curating a Catalog of Maintained Scientific Software Research Papers Addi Malviya-Thakur The University of Tennessee, Knoxville / Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Reed Milewicz Sandia National Laboratories, Mahmoud Jahanshahi University of Tennessee, Lavinia Francesca Paganini Eindhoven University of Technology, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University, Audris Mockus University of Tennessee Link to publication DOI | ||
16:30 20mTalk | Who Will Stop Contributing to OSS Projects? Predicting Company Turnover Based on Initial Behavior Research Papers Mian Qin Beijing Institute of Technology, Yuxia Zhang Beijing Institute of Technology, Klaas-Jan Stol Lero; University College Cork; SINTEF Digital , Hui Liu Beijing Institute of Technology DOI | ||
16:50 20mTalk | An empirical study of token-based micro commits Journal First Masanari Kondo Kyushu University, Daniel M. German University of Victoria, Yasutaka Kamei Kyushu University, Naoyasu Ubayashi Waseda University, Osamu Mizuno Kyoto Institute of Technology | ||
17:10 10mTalk | TS-Detector : Detecting Feature Toggle Usage Patterns Demonstrations Md Tajmilur Rahman Gannon University, Mengzhe Fei University of Saskatchewan; Vendasta, Tushar Sharma Dalhousie University, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan | ||
17:20 20mTalk | Impact of Request Formats on Effort Estimation: Are LLMs Different than Humans? Research Papers Gül Calikli University of Glasgow, Mohammed Alhamed Applied Behaviour Systems LTD (Hexis), United Kingdom DOI | ||
Cosmos 3C is the third room in the Cosmos 3 wing.
When facing the main Cosmos Hall, access to the Cosmos 3 wing is on the left, close to the stairs. The area is accessed through a large door with the number “3”, which will stay open during the event.