Abstract
Open Source Software (OSS) projects play a critical role in the digital infrastructure of companies and services provided to millions of people. Given their importance, understanding the resilience of OSS projects is paramount. A primary reason for OSS project failure is the shock caused by the dropout of a core developer, which can jeopardize productivity and project survival. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis, this study investigates the repercussions of this shock on the productivity of 8,234 developers identified among 9,573 OSS GitHub projects. Our findings reveal the indirect impact of the core developer's dropout. The remaining developers experienced a 20% productivity drop. This observation is troubling because it suggests that the shock might push other developers to drop out, putting the collaboration structure of the project at risk. Also, projects with higher productivity before the shock experienced a larger drop-down after the shock. This points to a tradeoff between productivity and resilience, i.e., the ability of OSS projects to recover from the dropout of a core developer. Our findings underscore the importance of a balanced approach in OSS project management, harmonizing productivity goals with resilience considerations.