Understanding the Archived Projects on GitHub

Open source software (OSS) on GitHub is experiencing continued growth and a rapid rise in the creation of projects. As OSS evolved, numerous projects faced decline, with some inevitably degrading into unmaintained status and getting archived by the owners. Understanding the deprecated projects helps deepen the perception of OSS maintenance and evolution. This paper describes the study of 361 popular GitHub projects that have been archived. By reading repository READMEs and sending surveys to project maintainers, we found the software repositories were archived due to being transferred, evolved, or unmaintained. We provide a set of 16 reasons and 10 practices to describe why and how these projects were archived. We further reveal the OSS development activity lifecycle patterns by fitting their commit history curves. We also confirmed the importance of the bus factor risk that would influence the sustainability of open source projects. Archiving a software repository is an explicit indication of repository deprecation. By providing the reason (the why), the strategy (the how), and the lifecycle patterns (the what) of the archived projects, we bring implications and practices that promote the health and sustainability of open source projects and the ecosystem overall.