  Software is often abandoned or shut down, for one reason or another, and
whilst research on academic open source software is sparse, there seems little
reason to assume it is any different. While some reasons may be
straightforward, e.g. a sole maintainer has moved on, or grant funding has
ceased - some projects are able to withstand these barriers and may remain
active and maintained despite adversity. This study monitored open source
projects over the period of a year, measuring common performance indicators,
using both subjective and qualitative measures (participant surveys), as well
as using scripts to analyse indicators associated with these projects' online
source control codebases. We find that these health indicators can not be used
as cross project benchmarks, due to the significant variation in context for
each project. They can, however, often be useful in signifying changes in a
single project's health, providing they are not used to compare between
different unrelated projects.

Software Engineering;Computers and Society