Success of Open Source Projects: Patterns of Downloads and Releases with Time

The success of software projects has many different facets: meeting user requirements, being developed within given budget and time constraints, and actually being used. We focus on one of them: the pattern of adoption by users, and its possible relationship with continued development. This is done based on readily available data for open source projects, namely their releases and downloads. Rather than just classifying projects as "successful" or "failure", we identify six distinct patterns of how the download rate changes with time that illuminate different aspects of successful or failed projects. "You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!" Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown, Back To The Future III, scene 8