# The penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic and more collaborative

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DRAGON: Robust Classification for Very Large Collections of Software Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09071/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

GitHub has become the central online platform for much of open source, hosting most open source code repositories. With this popularity, the public digital traces of GitHub are now a valuable means to study teamwork and collaboration. In many ways, however, GitHub is a convenience sample, and may not be representative of open source development off the platform. Here we develop a novel, extensive sample of public open source project repositories outside of centralized platforms. We characterized these projects along a number of dimensions, and compare to a time-matched sample of corresponding GitHub projects. Our sample projects tend to have more collaborators, are maintained for longer periods, and tend to be more focused on academic and scientific problems.