Open Source Project Health

Open source project health describes the potential of projects to continue developing and maintaining quality software, an issue that has long been overlooked. Recently, open source software failures have negatively affected millions of people (e.g., OpenSSL, Equifax), raising the question about the health of open source projects that develop these critically important pieces of software. Measuring and determining the health of open source projects that develop and maintain open source software is a difficult task and has been hard to do well. In this article, I describe issues that make open source project health difficult to measure and what the CHAOSS project has been doing to help with measuring the health of open source projects.