Software projects tend to go through distinct cycles of activity there is often a flurry of development at the start of a project as the framework and main features are put in place, then the pace tends to slow down as the project matures and effort shifts onto fixing bugs and improving performance.
Here’s the contribution history for CKAN, for example: One handy tool for doing this is the Ohloh website by Black Duck Software.
You can track this by looking at the project’s revision control system and looking at the pattern of contributions. Code activity: contributions and contributorsįor a project to be sustainable it must have contributors, and its codebase needs to be evolving. Note that these are by no means the only factors to look at when evaluating software see also OSS Watch's Top Tips for Selecting Open Source Software and Decision Factors for Open Source Software Procurement. In this document we’ll take a look at some of the key indicators of sustainability you can evaluate using basic web research techniques and publicly accessible information: However, there are also informal methods for evaluating the sustainability of an open source project that may be useful where investment in a formal methodology is not justified, for example if the number of software evaluations your organisation undertakes is fairly small and infrequent. However, from the viewpoint of selection and procurement, sustainability also means that the project is capable of delivering improvements and fixing problems with its products in a timely manner, and that the project itself has a reasonable prospect of continuing into the future.Įlsewhere on our site you can find articles describing some of the many formal approaches to evaluating open source software as part of the Software Sustainability Maturity Model. Simply put, they are able to meet their ongoing costs. Sustainable open source projects are those that are capable of supporting themselves.
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