Many OSS projects join foundations such as Apache, Eclipse, and OSGeo, to aid their immediate plans and improve long-term prospects by getting governance advice, incubation support, and community-building mechanisms. But foundations differ in their policies, funding models, and support strategies. Moreover, since projects joining these foundations are diverse, coming at different lifecycle stages and having different needs, it can be challenging to decide on the appropriate project-foundation match and on the project-specific plan for sustainability. Here, we present an empirical study and quantitative analysis of the sustainability of incubator projects in the Apache, Eclipse, and OSGeo foundations, and, additionally, of OSS projects from GitHub outside of foundations. We develop foundation-specific sustainability models and a project triage, based on projects' sociotechnical trace profiles, and demonstrate their effectiveness across the foundations. Our results show that our models with triage can effectively forecast sustainability outcomes not only within but across foundations. In addition, the generalizability of the framework allows us to apply the approach to GitHub projects outside the foundations. We complement our findings with actionable recovery strategies from previous work and apply them to case studies of failed incubator projects. Our study highlights the value of sociotechnical frameworks in characterizing and addressing software project sustainability issues.

翻译：许多开源软件项目加入Apache、Eclipse和OSGeo等基金会，通过获取治理建议、孵化支持和社区建设机制来助力其近期规划并改善长期前景。然而，各基金会在政策、资助模式和支持策略上存在差异。此外，由于加入这些基金会的项目具有多样性——处于不同的生命周期阶段且需求各异——如何确定合适的项目-基金会匹配关系以及制定针对具体项目的可持续性计划颇具挑战。本文对Apache、Eclipse和OSGeo基金会孵化项目以及GitHub上非基金会托管开源项目的可持续性进行了实证研究与定量分析。我们基于项目的社会技术轨迹特征，开发了基金会特定的可持续性模型及项目分类评估机制，并验证了该模型在不同基金会间的有效性。研究结果表明，结合分类评估的模型不仅能有效预测单一基金会内部且能跨基金会预测可持续性结果。此外，该框架的普适性使我们能够将方法应用于基金会外部的GitHub项目。我们结合先前工作中提出的可执行恢复策略对研究结果进行补充，并将其应用于失败孵化项目的案例研究。本研究表明社会技术框架在表征和解决软件项目可持续性问题方面具有重要价值。