Nowadays, numerous organisations from different industries and sectors have adopted Open Source Software (OSS) applications, because OSS development has come to be known as a reliable alternative to proprietary software that has the ability to produce cheap software of high quality. However, despite the increasing adoption of OSS applications, most OSS projects are abandoned after a while and experience failure. The objective of this research, therefore, is to extract the factors that drive success in OSS projects by developing and testing a research model that examines the influences of project characteristics and capabilities on the success of OSS projects. To test the relationships hypothesised, I collected data from 1409 OSS projects in a longitudinal fashion (over a period of 16 months). Results derived from my analysis show the following: (1) the number of operating systems with which an OSS project is compatible, the number of spoken languages into which a project is translated, using the OSS community’s preferred programming languages and project age positively impact OSS project success; (2) OSS projects’ capabilities of defect-removal, functionality-enhancement and release management are positively associated with their success; (3) the three measures of OSS project success – namely, user interest, developer interest and development sustainability – are interrelated; (4) overall, project characteristics and project capabilities have more or less equal predictive value to explain user interest, whereas project capabilities have relatively stronger predictive value to explain developer interest than project characteristics; and (5) although few of the relationships proposed are found to change over time, the longitudinal part of this research explores a temporal persistence in the relationship between OSS project success and its determinants in this study (that is, project characteristics and capabilities). In addition to having significant implications for research and theory, this study has several implications for managers of OSS projects, corporations that are interested in adopting OSS products, potential OSS sponsors, the OSS developer community and OSS hosting portals.
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