Performance of GitHub Open-Source Software Project: An Empirical Analysis

The phenomenon of open-source software (OSS) has gained importance among the information technology (IT) firms and software entrepreneurial ventures in the recent years due to its advantages over proprietary closed software including high level of innovation, low cost of development, availability of reusable architectural and functional component, free and unrestrictive access to the source codes. The firms have started recognizing the importance and value of the open source software over the proprietary closed software. It is important to understand and analyze various characteristics of the OSS projects which influence their performance. In this research, we examine OSS project characteristics forks count, number of contributors, project age, project size, project owner, number of programming languages used, primary language intensity, and watchers using 130 project repositories which are started in 2017 from GitHub one of the leading web-based Git version control repository hosting services. A conceptual model of OSS Project performance and hypotheses are developed. The results conclude that the number of programming languages, the project size, the number of contributors, and the project age are showing significant positive influence on the OSS project performance. The project ownership and the primary language are not showing any significant influence on the OSS project performance.