Recently I've found an idea that "The longer a technology has been around, the longer it’s likely to stay around." [J. Coock blog].
I've found that some software developers consider it interesting (see comments on my post on Ukrainian developer's forum).
Unfortunatelly I haven't found some statistics to prove that assumption.
There is a openhub.com resource which collects different statistics on open source software projects.
I've scanned first 34000 projects from it. Results of my scanning is available at [google docs report file]. In that file createdAt stands for date when openhub originally scanned the project, updatedAt stands for a date when openhub submitted last modifications (in general it rescans the project biweekly).
The summarized statistics is given on the table-1. The obtained statistics is not that reliable due to limited input data set etc, but it could be considered as a starting point.
Note: due to limited time range only first several rows could be considered.
Plase also note, that most of openhub projects are closed automatically in some scheduled dates. So the summarized statistics is close to misleading, you'll better use the [google docs report file] and calculate yourself
Table-1: summarized statistics
| Projects age (end of life) years | Number of project of length of life >= | Percentage of survived additional 0.5 years | Percentage of survived additional 1 years | Percentage of survived additional 1.5 years | Percentage of survived additional 2 years | Percentage of survived additional 2.5 years | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 34050 | 48% | 46% | 45% | 42% | 41% | ||
| 0.05 | 20270 | 80% | 77% | 75% | 71% | 69% | ||
| 0.25 | 17013 | 94% | 91% | 89% | 84% | 81% | ||
| 0.5 | 16211 | 97% | 94% | 89% | 87% | 83% | ||
| 0.75 | 15915 | 97% | 95% | 89% | 86% | 21% | ||
| 1 | 15706 | 97% | 91% | 90% | 86% | 6% | ||
| 1.25 | 15490 | 98% | 92% | 88% | 21% | |||
| 1.5 | 15305 | 94% | 92% | 88% | 6% | |||
| 1.75 | 15143 | 94% | 90% | 22% | ||||
| 2 | 14354 | 98% | 94% | 6% | ||||
| 2.25 | 14214 | 96% | 23% | |||||
| 2.5 | 14070 | 96% | 7% | |||||
| 2.75 | 13703 | 24% | ||||||
| 3 | 13523 | 7% |
