I’ve been working in the tools group of a company for a little while, and we have a shared repository space called a “project” where we place repositories repositoies. Many times when working on active initiatives, it has been an annoyance among several team members that there are so many repositories in the shared space. So, I look around in a little more detail, and pretty soon, I found that there were several unmaintained repos cluttering the list of repos in the project. Nearly 50% of all the project repos are now unmaintained. This happened in about 4 years time for most of them, some of them 7 years time.
Reflecting on this, it really makes you think. First of all, this is biased toward small respositories. But, even them, in 4 years time, 50% of small-time projects will have been replaced? Also, this appears to be affected by the employment turnover rate in different areas of the company. In the areas of the company outside the United States where the turnover rates are higher, there appears to be a much bigger swath of abandoned projects than in the United States where the turnover rate is lower.