  In nature ecosystems, animal life-spans are determined by genes and some
other biological characteristics. Similarly, the software project life-spans
are related to some internal or external characteristics. Analyzing the
relations between these characteristics and the project life-span, may help
developers, investors, and contributors to control the development cycle of the
software project. The paper provides an insight on the project life-span for a
free open source software ecosystem. The statistical analysis of some project
characteristics in GitHub is presented, and we find that the choices of
programming languages, the number of files, the label format of the project,
and the relevant membership expressions can impact the life-span of a project.
Based on these discovered characteristics, we also propose a prediction model
to estimate the project life-span in open source software ecosystems. These
results may help developers reschedule the project in open source software
ecosystem.
