Open source software (OSS) generates trillions of dollars in economic value and has become essential to the technical infrastructures that power organizations worldwide. As these systems increasingly depend on OSS, understanding the evolution of these projects is critical. While existing metrics provide insights into project health, one dimension remains understudied: project resilience, or the ability to return to normal operations after disturbances such as contributor departures,security vulnerabilities and bug report spikes. We hypothesize that stable commit patterns may serve as an indicator of underlying project characteristics such as mature governance, sustained contributors, and robust development processes, factors that existing research associates with resilience. Our findings reveal that only 2% of repositories exhibit daily stability, 29% achieve weekly stability, and 50\% demonstrate monthly stability, while the remaining half are unstable across all levels of granularity. Analysis of the 50 unstable repositories indicate that 86% of activity is concentrated among a few maintainers, with the top 3 contributors accounting for over 50% of commits in the past 5 years. In contrast, the 50 stable repositories distribute work more evenly, with the top 3 contributors representing less than 50% of commits. Our insights thus far indicate the fragile and multi-dimensional nature of OSS project stability, suggesting a need to go beyond commits to understand how our understanding of stability can be enriched with other considerations such as community engagement metrics and issue or pull request churn. Though our efforts only identified two repositories that achieved stability at all three temporal commit granularities, further investigation into their processes and policies can provide insights and foundations for stability-informed risk assessment in practice.

翻译：开源软件（OSS）创造了数万亿美元的经济价值，并已成为支撑全球组织技术基础设施的关键要素。随着这些系统日益依赖OSS，理解这些项目的演化变得至关重要。现有指标虽能洞察项目健康状况，但有一个维度仍未得到充分研究：项目韧性，即在贡献者离职、安全漏洞和错误报告激增等干扰后恢复正常运营的能力。我们假设稳定的提交模式可能作为底层项目特征（如成熟治理、持续贡献者和稳健开发流程）的指标，这些因素在现有研究中被认为与韧性相关。我们的研究结果显示，仅有2%的代码库表现出日级稳定性，29%达到周级稳定性，50%呈现月级稳定性，而剩余半数在所有时间粒度上均不稳定。对50个不稳定代码库的分析表明，86%的活动集中在少数维护者中，前3位贡献者在过去5年内的提交量占比超过50%。相比之下，50个稳定代码库的工作分配更为均衡，前3位贡献者的提交占比低于50%。我们目前的发现揭示了OSS项目稳定性的脆弱性和多维度本质，表明需要超越提交数据，通过社区参与度指标、问题或拉取请求流转率等其他考量因素来丰富我们对稳定性的理解。尽管我们的研究仅发现两个代码库在所有三个时间提交粒度上均实现稳定，但对其流程和政策的进一步调查可为实践中基于稳定性的风险评估提供见解和基础。