What Makes Open Source Software Projects Impactful: A Data-Driven Approach

Abstract

With the wide adoption and acceptance of open source version control and hosting systems, more and more companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, are putting their projects on such platforms, e.g., GitHub. It is very important for open source projects to be impactful, i.e., to attract attentions from the open source development community, so as to gain support on development, testing as well as maintenance from the community. However, the question of what factors affect open source project impact, remains largely open. Given the numerous confounding factors and the complex correlations among the factors, it is a challenge to answer the question. In this study, we gather a large dataset from GitHub and provide empirical insights on this question base on a data-driven approach. We randomly collect 146,286 projects from GitHub and then adopt data analysis techniques to automatically analyze the correlations of different features with the software project impact. We also provide suggestions on how to potentially make open source projects impactful base on our analysis results.