Ask Slashdot: How Do You Assess the Status of an Open Source Project?

Chrisq writes: "Our software landscape includes a number of open source components, and we currently assume that these components will follow the same life-cycle as commercial products: they will have a beta or test phase, a supported phase, and finally reach the end of life. In fact, a clear statement that support is ended is unusual. The statement by Apache that Struts 1 has reached end of life is almost unique. What we usually find is:

• Projects that appear to be obviously inactive, having had no updates for years
• Projects that are obviously not going to be used in any new deployments because the standard language, library, or platform now has the capability built in
• Projects that are rapidly losing developers to some more-trendy alternative project
• Projects whose status is unclear, with some releases and statements in the forums that they are 'definitely alive,' but which seem to have lost direction or momentum.
• Projects that have had no updates but are highly stable and do what is necessary, but are risky because they may not interoperate with future upgrades to other components.

By the treating Open Source in the same way as commercial software we only start registering risks when there is an official announcement. We have no metric we can use to accurately gauge the state of an open source component — but there are a number of components that we have a 'bad feeling' about. Are there any standard ways of assessing the status of an open source project? Do you use the same stages for open source as commercial components? How do you incorporate these in a software landscape to indicate at-risk components and dependencies?"

Comments

Technical debt

[vikingpower]

One metric yielding interesting results is the concept of "technical debt", as introduced by Martin Fowler. Sonar Source, for example, measures this metric very well. A project that has seen neither increase ( recently taken risk ) nor decrease ( recent moves toward stabilization ) may very well be dead. I recently used it upon our own software of 580 KSLOC. The interesting conclusion: core stable, some utilities half dead or worse, much life springing up at the functional fringes. This also holds for e.g tomcat. The tactical and strategical conclusions one may draw from such considerations are fascinating.