  Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of
modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a
result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen
before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality
rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source
projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of
104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine
reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some
maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines
and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project
failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies
developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.
