Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2208.01105

How to characterize the health of an Open Source Software project? A snowball literature review of an emerging practice

Johan Linåker·Efi Papatheocharous·Thomas Olsson
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Motivation: Society's dependence on Open Source Software (OSS) and the communities that maintain the OSS is ever-growing. So are the potential risks of, e.g., vulnerabilities being introduced in projects not actively maintained. By assessing an OSS project's capability to stay viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, i.e., the OSS health, users can consider the risk implied by using the OSS as is, and if necessary, decide whether to help improve the health or choose another option. However, such assessment is complex as OSS health covers a wide range of sub-topics, and existing support is limited. Aim: We aim to create an overview of characteristics that affect the health of an OSS project and enable the assessment thereof. Method: We conduct a snowball literature review based on a start set of 9 papers, and identify 146 relevant papers over two iterations of forward and backward snowballing. Health characteristics are elicited and coded using structured and axial coding into a framework structure. Results: The final framework consists of 104 health characteristics divided among 15 themes. Characteristics address the socio-technical spectrum of the community of actors maintaining the OSS project, the software and other deliverables being maintained, and the orchestration facilitating the maintenance. Characteristics are further divided based on the level of abstraction they address, i.e., the OSS project-level specifically, or the project's overarching ecosystem of related OSS projects. Conclusion: The framework provides an overview of the wide span of health characteristics that may need to be considered when evaluating OSS health and can serve as a foundation both for research and practice.

Explore related subjects

cs.SE

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Johan Linåker, Efi Papatheocharous, Thomas Olsson. 2022-08-01. How to characterize the health of an Open Source Software project? A snowball literature review of an emerging practice. https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01105

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

LLMVul: A Vulnerability-Labeled Dataset of LLM-Generated C/C++ Functions from Real Production Repositories

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate and assist with software development, yet existing vulnerability datasets largely focus on human-written code or controlled prompting environments. This limits the ability to study security weaknesses in LLM-generated code as it appears in real-world software projects. We present LLMVul, a vulnerability-labeled dataset of LLM-generated C/C++ functions mined from real production repositories. We mine AI-assisted development activity from GitHub over a 4 year period, from November 13, 2022 to September 3, 2026, using provenance signals such as commit metadata and AI-related authorship evidence. After filtering and deduplication, LLMVul contains 21,430 unique C/C++ functions from 226 repositories, together with repository, commit, function, provenance, and AI-tool metadata. We establish vulnerability labels using an ensemble of complementary static-analysis and pattern-based techniques and assign Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories to confirmed vulnerable functions. To assess labeling reliability, we additionally conduct independent manual annotation and measure inter-rater agreement using Cohen's kappa ($k=0.79$). LLMVul contains 1,540 ensemble-vulnerable functions spanning 17 unique CWE categories, providing substantially more real-world LLM-generated vulnerable C/C++ functions than existing vulnerability-oriented LLM code benchmarks. By preserving both code-level vulnerability labels and generation/provenance metadata, LLMVul enables reproducible research on vulnerability detection, security evaluation of LLM-generated code, and analysis of vulnerability patterns in AI-assisted software development. The LLMVul dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22668216.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

What a Random Draw from the MCP Registry Contains, and What Tool-Use Benchmarks Contain Instead

Studies of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server ecosystem draw their samples in ways that quietly select for servers that work: reference sets, popularity lists, hand-curated frames, or pipelines that repair a server until it starts. We report what an unrepaired probability sample actually contains. From a 24,135-server registry census we draw 400 npm/stdio servers with a published seed and probe each one over the wire. Only 48.8% complete an initialize handshake, against 66.7% for a hand-curated frame measured with the same instrument, and the dominant failure is not missing credentials (13.3%) but servers that never start at all (37.5%). Among the 195 that do run, hard conformance is total: zero fatal JSON Schema violations across 2,766 advertised tools. Optional safety annotations are the real variance, and the tool-level omission rate on a random draw is 58.8% against 41.5% on the curated frame, so curation flatters this figure too. We then compare the tool descriptions these servers advertise against two tool-use benchmark corpora using one method held constant. Real MCP tools show 2.8% near-duplication at cosine 0.70, and all of it lies within single servers: cross-author near-duplication is 0.0% at every threshold tested. BFCL v4 shows 16.7%, of which 16.4 points lie between independently presented tasks. UltraTool shows 0.3%, cleaner than real tools, so this is a property of BFCL and not of synthetic corpora as a class. Separately, 68.8% of raw BFCL rows and 85.6% of raw UltraTool rows are exact name-plus-description repeats, against 0.4% for real MCP, so any statistic computed over these releases without global deduplication measures repetition rather than tools. All figures regenerate from released scripts and a published seed.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Engineering Reliable Commit Gates for Agentic AI: Cost-Aware Verification Portfolios under Common-Mode Data Failures

Agentic systems commit state-changing actions, but additional verifiers can inherit the same upstream fault. We present VP-CONTROL, a runtime-assurance design and deterministic benchmark for cost-aware commit gates. Its 48 task templates yield 2,880 scenarios across six fault regimes. A fixed-call 2 x 2 experiment separates verifier-model diversity from evidence-source diversity. On frozen proposals from two local actor families, a cross-model vote over shared evidence approves 62.9% of unsafe proposals, versus 22.9% with an independent source. The source effect is 40.9 percentage points, compared with 11.3 for model diversity. A portfolio controller selects verification plans using only deployment-observable metadata. Approximate cluster-adjusted calibration at a nominal 5% per-task target yields 1.9% unsafe execution and 38.2% automated safe coverage on the locked test. Matched-budget portfolios also improve on fixed verification policies. Transfer remains conditional: unseen fault families yield 16-26% risk, and a FinQA check fails to reproduce the source effect with the tested small verifiers. A preregistered live HTTP/SQLite study tests concurrent writes and lost responses. After-check races defeat verifier-only gates; transactional partial guards prevent only covered failures, while a full atomic guard records no unsafe effects across 216 episodes. Idempotent request identifiers prevent duplicate effects after lost responses. The results motivate explicit evidence lineage, cost-aware selection, and commit-time enforcement, while exposing the limits of approximate calibration and local-tool generalization.

cs.SE↗