Researchers from Japan have used socio-technical techniques to measure the congruence between the network of contributors to open-source programming libraries and the dependencies of that library within the ecosystem. This work suggests that the level of matching between the network of contributors and networks of dependencies could be used as an indicator of libraries at risk of becoming inactive.
The modern computer programs that run your favorite apps or websites can be extremely large, often measured in millions of lines of code. This is obviously much more complex than can be handled by any one individual. Most programming languages therefore rely on specialized modules called third-party libraries to accomplish specific tasks. These libraries are often open-source and freely available to anyone who wants to download and use them.
