---
title: Open Source project durations
url: https://www.grahambrooks.com/post/2011-04-28-open-source-project-durations/
date: 2011-04-28T00:00:00+00:00
author: Graham Brooks
---

# Open Source project durations

During a recent discussion about open source development we wondered
how long these projects lasted. In particular if there was a rapid
drop off in activity.

One of the great things about recent open source code repositories is
that they often provide APIs allowing this sort of analysis. The chart
below was generated from a sample of 2360 public
[GitHub](http://www.github.com) repositories. I took the started
pushed-at and created-at dates to calculate how many days a repository
had been worked on. I then grouped them together into 30 day
increments and charted the count in each 30 day period.

This has probably been done before but I find the results interesting.

![Github project durations chart]({{ site.url }}/images/Screen-shot-2011-04-28-at-20.25.11.png)