Commercial Participation in OpenStack: Two Sides of a Coin

Zhang, Yuxia; He, Hao; Zhou, Minghui; Riehle, Dirk

doi:10.1109/mc.2021.3133052

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…As suggested by prior work [34,83] and the survey in this study, there is a perception that companies tend to develop big features in-house that are subsequently contributed to OSS projects. Our quantitative analysis confirms this; peripheral paid developers tend to focus more on implementing features than do volunteers.…”

Section: Improving Company Participation In Ossmentioning

confidence: 64%

“…Further, companies have specific business objectives when contributing to OSS, such as integrating their own products [83,87], and paid developers are typically assigned particular tasks that are important to their employer's feature roadmap. On the other hand, volunteers tend to contribute to open source projects because of their interest and 'passion' [1,80]; while motives will vary, volunteers who contribute to a project will want to see that project succeed and improve over time.…”

Section: Related Work and Hypotheses 21 Paid And Volunteer Oss Develo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project

Zhang,

Qin,

Stol

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

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It is now commonplace for organizations to pay developers to work on specific open source software (OSS) projects to pursue their business goals. Such paid developers work alongside voluntary contributors, but given the different motivations of these two groups of developers, conflict may arise, which may pose a threat to a project's sustainability. This paper presents an empirical study of paid developers and volunteers in Rust, a popular open source programming language project. Rust is a particularly interesting case given considerable concerns about corporate participation. We compare volunteers and paid developers through contribution characteristics and long-term participation, and solicit volunteers' perceptions on paid developers. We find that core paid developers tend to contribute more frequently; commits contributed by onetime paid developers have bigger sizes; peripheral paid developers implement more features; and being paid plays a positive role in becoming a long-term contributor. We also find that volunteers do have some prejudices against paid developers. This study suggests that the dichotomous view of paid vs. volunteer developers is too simplistic and that further subgroups can be identified. Companies should become more sensitive to how they engage with OSS communities, in certain ways as suggested by this study.

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Section: Improving Company Participation In Ossmentioning

confidence: 64%