Reclassifying Success and Tragedy in FLOSS Projects

This paper presents the results of a replication of English & Schweik’s 2007 paper classifying FLOSS projects according to their stage of growth and indicators of success. We recreated the analysis using a comparable data set from 2006, with one additional point in time. We also expanded upon the original results by applying different criteria for evaluating the rate of new software releases for sustainability of project activity. We discuss the points of convergence and divergence from the original work from these extensions of the classification, and their implications for studying FLOSS development using archival data. The paper contributes new analysis of operationalizing success in FLOSS projects, with discussion of implications of the findings.