| The research on antecedents to the success of Open Source Software (OSS) is important and provides practical insights into how project administrators can manage OSS projects more effectively. A research model and eight sets of hypotheses were developed based on the review of relevant literature from the fields of project management and software engineering. We studied the impact of intrinsic as well as extrinsic characteristics of OSS projects, including the modularity and complexity of source code, the number of users and the number of developers associated with a project, the assignment of responsibility, the license restrictiveness, and the number of available translational languages, on the success of OSS projects. We tested the hypotheses and model with data collected in a longitudinal fashion (over 3 years) from SourceForge, the biggest OSS projects repository. Our study found some very useful results for both long term and short term management of OSS projects. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. |
