There are many initiatives of open-source software which have success stories for web engineering such as apache tomcat, apache HTTP server and python. Many of these projects have enjoyed wide industry adoption for web-based applications. For the open source software (OSS) community and observer, it is important to determine whether a (new) project initiative is worthwhile, i.e., warrants a closer look and/or sustained support. This paper proposes ab evaluation process and concept for "health" indicators that can help getting an overview on a large number of OSS projects. For initial empirical evaluation of the concept, we apply the indicators to well-knows OSS projects and discuss the results with OSS experts to invesrigate the external validity of the indicators.
Keywords: Open source project health, open source project management, web engineering, data mining.
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