Although the open source model bears many advantages in software development, open source projects are always hard to sustain. Previous research on open source sustainability mainly focuses on projects that have already reached a certain level of maturity (e.g., with communities, releases, and downstream projects). However, limited attention is paid to the development of (sustainable) open source projects in their infancy, and we believe an understanding of early sustainability determinants is crucial for project initiators, incubators, newcomers, and users. In this paper, we aim to explore the relationship between early participation factors and long-term project sustainability. We leverage a novel methodology that measures the early participation of 290,255 GitHub projects during the first three months with reference to the Blumberg model, trains an XGBoost model to predict project's two-year sustained activity, and interprets the trained model using LIME. We quantitatively show that early participants have a positive effect on project's future sustained activity if they have prior experience in OSS project incubation and demonstrate concentrated focus and steady commitment. Participation from non-code contributors and detailed contribution documentation also promote project's sustained activity. Compared with individual projects, building a community that consists of more experienced core developers and more active peripheral developers is important for organizational projects. This study provides unique insights into the incubation and recognition of sustainable open source projects, and our interpretable prediction approach can also offer guidance to open source project initiators and newcomers.

翻译：尽管开源模式在软件开发中具有诸多优势，但开源项目往往难以持续发展。以往关于开源可持续性的研究主要关注已达到一定成熟度的项目（例如拥有社区、版本发布及下游项目）。然而，对于（可持续）开源项目在起步阶段的发展研究十分有限，而我们相信理解早期可持续性决定因素对项目发起者、孵化机构、新加入者及用户至关重要。本文旨在探索早期参与因素与项目长期可持续性之间的关系。我们采用了一种创新方法论，基于Blumberg模型量化分析了290,255个GitHub项目在最初三个月的早期参与模式，训练XGBoost模型预测项目两年的持续活动水平，并利用LIME解释模型结果。定量研究表明：若早期参与者在开源软件项目孵化方面具有相关经验，且展现出专注投入与持续承诺，则其对项目未来的持续活跃度具有积极影响。非代码贡献者的参与及详细的贡献文档也能促进项目的持续活跃度。相较于个人项目，构建由经验更丰富的核心开发者与更活跃的边缘开发者组成的社区，对组织类项目尤为重要。本研究为可持续开源项目的孵化与识别提供了独特见解，同时我们的可解释性预测方法可为开源项目发起者与新加入者提供指导。