2025 Volume 42 Issue 3 Pages 3_71-3_83
The popularity of open-source software (OSS) has grown alongside the expansion of software development, facilitating various innovations. However, the continuous development of OSS is not guaranteed. Risks such as vulnerabilities and bugs might be present, and these issues could remain unaddressed for a long time. Therefore, it is important to estimate how long the development of OSS will continue to mitigate the risks associated with OSS adoption. This study aims to identify features that can effectively estimate the duration of OSS development. Our findings indicate that, half of the active OSS projects at any given time become inactive after approximately 48 months. Additionally, analyzing the number of time zones of OSS developers and the size of the top-level directories in projects can provide insights into the continuity of OSS development.
