With the development of open source community, through the interaction of developers, the collaborative development of software, and the sharing of software tools, the formation of open source software ecosystem has matured. Natural ecosystems provide ecological services on which human beings depend. Maintaining a healthy natural ecosystem is a necessity for the sustainable development of mankind. Similarly, maintaining a healthy ecosystem of open source software is also a prerequisite for the sustainable development of open source communities, such as GitHub. This paper takes GitHub as an example to analyze the health condition of open source ecosystem and, also, it is a research area in Symmetry. Firstly, the paper presents the healthy definition of GitHub open source ecosystem health and, then, according to the main components of natural ecosystem health, the paper proposes the health indicators and health indicators evaluation method. Based on the above, the GitHub ecosystem health prediction method is proposed. By analyzing the projects and data collected in GitHub, it is found that, using the proposed evaluation indicators and method, we can analyze the healthy development trend of the GitHub ecosystem and contribute to the stability of ecosystem development. Symmetry 2019, 11, 144 3 of 16 sustainability in natural ecosystems. Liao et al. [20] measured the sustainability of open source software ecosystem from the aspects of openness, stability, activity, and extensibility, and applied the assessment method of open source software ecosystem sustainability from the target level, criterion level, and measurement level to stack overflow.At present, the research of software ecosystem mainly focuses on system structure, participants, and ecosystem characteristics. The research on ecosystem health is mainly based on its theoretical research, and there is less quantitative analysis of the health indicators. Therefore, it is worthwhile to get into the questions of how to analyze the GitHub ecosystem health quantitatively, and how to predict the healthiness of the ecosystem.
GitHub Ecosystem Health Prediction MethodIn this section, the working process of GitHub ecosystem and the various behaviors of users in the GitHub ecosystem will be introduced in Section 3.1, and then followed by the Health Prediction Model of GitHub Ecosystem (HPGE model). Figure 1 is an overview of the HPGE model. Symmetry 2019, 11, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 16 sustainability in natural ecosystems. Liao et al. [20] measured the sustainability of open source software ecosystem from the aspects of openness, stability, activity, and extensibility, and applied the assessment method of open source software ecosystem sustainability from the target level, criterion level, and measurement level to stack overflow.At present, the research of software ecosystem mainly focuses on system structure, participants, and ecosystem characteristics. The research on ecosystem health is mainly based on its theoretical research, and there is less quantitative analysis o...