The field of open-source software is moving towards a greater emphasis on sustainability and maintenance. Researchers are investigating the factors that contribute to the long-term health of open-source projects, including community engagement, software quality, and maintainer responsiveness. A key challenge in this area is the accumulation of technical debt, which can arise during maintenance activities such as backporting. Studies have shown that understanding the reasons behind unaddressed bug reports and identifying the sources of technical debt can inform practices that promote a more robust and responsive open-source ecosystem. Noteworthy papers in this area include:

• Uncovering Scientific Software Sustainability through Community Engagement and Software Quality Metrics, which presents a novel visualization technique for displaying software metrics over time.
• An insight into the technical debt-fix trade off in software backporting, which examines the technical debt involved in fixing commits from backport sources across multiple software ecosystems.