Analysing the Sentiments in a Hybrid FLOSS Community based on Commits

Abstract

Open source repositories, by their nature, are open for study. This has inspired researchers to study them using various tools, leading to an established body of knowledge regarding how developers execute their work, communicate, and coordinate the effort. One flavor of open source community, which has received less attention, is hybrid open source, where developers and other stakeholders with various backgrounds exist. In this paper, we perform a sentiment analysis to a hybrid open source community, based on comments given when making commits. The goal is to understand if the community members behave differently, depending on their background in the company that owns the community IPR, being an independent contributor, or representing a collaborating organization. Based on the results, we find that there indeed is a clear difference in the sentiments, with in-house developers having a tendency to be more negative than independent developers, who in contrast express positive sentiments in their commit comments.