Inflow and Retention in OSS Communities with Commercial Involvement

Abstract

Motivation: Open-source projects are often supported by companies, but such involvement often affects the robust contributor inflow needed to sustain the project and sometimes prompts key contributors to leave. To capture user innovation and to maintain quality of software and productivity of teams, these projects need to attract and retain contributors. Aim: We want to understand and quantify how inflow and retention are shaped by policies and actions of companies in three application server projects. Method: We identified three hybrid projects implementing the same JavaEE specification and used published literature, online materials, and interviews to quantify actions and policies companies used to get involved. We collected project repository data, analyzed affiliation history of project participants, and used generalized linear models and survival analysis to measure contributor inflow and retention. Results: We identified coherent groups of policies and actions undertaken by sponsoring companies as three models of community involvement and quantified tradeoffs between the inflow and retention each model provides. We found that full control mechanisms and high intensity of commercial involvement were associated with a decrease of external inflow and with improved retention. However, a shared control mechanism was associated with increased external inflow contemporaneously with the increase of commercial involvement. Implications: Inspired by a natural experiment, our methods enabled us to quantify aspects of the balance between community and private interests in open- source software projects and provide clear implications for the structure of future open-source communities.

Who drives company-owned OSS projects: internal or external members?

“…This could only be possible because the studied projects welcome external members (which is not always the case of open-source software [18]). We further support this claim by inspecting welcoming-community features 20 description, a README.md file, a Code of Conduct file, a CONTRIBUTING.md file, and a license file. External developers still need guidance.…”

“…It is possible to notice an increase in the participation of companies in OSS and in the contributions of employees paid to work on OSS projects [3,20]. Homscheid and Schaarschmidt [21] investigated the role of external developers who are paid by third-party companies ("firm-sponsored developers").…”

Crowd-intelligence-based software development method and practices

“…• 在大众参与机制方面, 开源最初主要依靠参与者的兴趣爱好和个体需求来吸引大众自愿参与, 近 年来越来越多的商业公司安排全职员工参与开源 [14] . 但是开源模式目前对自由参与者尚缺乏足够的 激励机制, 对参与者创新利益的保护不足; 众包则通过采用一系列激励机制, 吸引开放大众的主动参 与, 并通过奖励回报实现对参与者利益的保护.…”

Will You Come Back to Contribute? Investigating the Inactivity of OSS Core Developers in GitHub

“…The limited research about understanding developers' disengagement has focused on the risks that projects incur when they lose developers (Ricca and Marchetto, 2010;Avelino et al, 2019;Ferreira et al, 2017) and factors related to the developers' abandonment, using the survival analysis technique (Lin et al, 2017). To avoid developers' disengagement, researchers analyzed the factors related to developers' engagement and retention (Schilling, 2014;Midha and Palvia, 2007;Zhou et al, 2016). However, these factors fail to consider the developers' rhythm or the disengagement stages and their transitions.…”