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.

翻译：激励:社会对开放源码软件(OSS)和保持开放源码软件的社区的依赖正在不断增长。在不积极维持的项目中引入脆弱性等潜在风险也在不断增长。通过评估开放源码软件项目在不中断或削弱的情况下保持可行和保持的能力,即开放源码软件健康,用户可以考虑使用开放源码软件所带来的风险,必要时可以决定是否帮助改善健康或选择另一个选项。然而,这种评估是复杂的,因为开放源码软件健康涵盖广泛的分专题,现有支持有限。目标:我们的目标是全面了解影响开放源码软件项目健康的特点,从而能够对其进行评估。方法:我们根据一套9份文件来进行雪球文献审查,确定146份关于前向和后向的雪球的两个迭代体的相关论文。健康特征是通过结构化和轴心编码来得出和编码的。在框架结构中,结果:最终框架由104个不同主题组成,现有支持范围有限的支持。我们的目标是:对影响开放源码软件项目健康的特点进行概览,并便于评估。