Cheating Death: A Statistical Survival Analysis of Publicly Available Python Projects

We apply survival analysis methods to a dataset of publicly-available software projects in order to examine the attributes that might lead to their inactivity over time. We ran a Kaplan-Meier analysis and fit a Cox Proportional-Hazards model to a subset of Software Heritage Graph Dataset, consisting of 3052 popular Python projects hosted on GitLab/GitHub, Debian, and PyPI, over a period of 165 months. We show that projects with repositories on multiple hosting services, a timeline of publishing major releases, and a good network of developers, remain healthy over time and should be worthy of the effort put in by developers and contributors.