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Abstract

Software ecosystems have gained a lot of attention in recent times. Industry and developers gather around technologies and collaborate to their advancement; when the boundaries of such an effort go beyond certain amount of projects, we are witnessing the appearance of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) ecosystems. In this chapter, we explore two aspects that contribute to a healthy ecosystem, related to the attraction (and detraction) and the death of ecosystems. To function and survive, ecosystems need to attract people, get them onboarded, and retain them. In Section One, we explore possibilities with provocative research questions for attracting and detracting contributors (and users): the lifeblood of FLOSS ecosystems. Then, in the Section Two, we focus on the death of systems, exploring some presumed to be dead systems and their state in the afterlife.

Raula is the main contributor of attractors and detractors (i.e., life) to FLOSS Projects

Gregorio is the main contributor for the death of ecosystems

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.reddit.com.

  2. 2.

    https://news.ycombinator.com.

  3. 3.

    https://slashdot.org.

  4. 4.

    https://stackoverflow.com.

  5. 5.

    https://www.bountysource.com/.

  6. 6.

    A blog post for 2018 best PHP frameworks at https://coderseye.com/best-php-frameworks-for-web-developers/.

  7. 7.

    A blog that shows the trend changes between rival JavaScript frameworkshttps://stackoverflow.blog/2018/01/11/brutal-lifecycle-javascript-frameworks/.

  8. 8.

    InnerSource takes the lessons learned from developing FLOSS and applies them to the way companies develop software internally. Taken from https://paypal.github.io/InnerSourceCommons/.

  9. 9.

    Website is at https://www.nongnu.org/cvs/.

  10. 10.

    Although an official website is not found, the blog of one of the key engineers is an example of its existence https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf796e8fb.

  11. 11.

    Website available at http://geronimo.apache.org/.

  12. 12.

    Website available at http://maemo.org/intro/.

  13. 13.

    Website available at https://www.march-hare.com/cvspro/.

  14. 14.

    Website at https://www.kaiostech.com/.

  15. 15.

    Website as http://tomcat.apache.org/.

  16. 16.

    Website at http://tomee.apache.org/tomcat-ejb.html.

  17. 17.

    Website at https://db.apache.org/derby/.

  18. 18.

    A variant of MeeGo is Tizen https://www.tizen.org/.

  19. 19.

    Website as http://www.merproject.org/.

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Correspondence to Raula Gaikovina Kula .

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Kula, R.G., Robles, G. (2019). The Life and Death of Software Ecosystems. In: Fitzgerald, B., Mockus, A., Zhou, M. (eds) Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_6

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