Towards automatically identifying paid open source developers

Claes, Maelick; Mäntylä, Martti; Kuutila, Miikka; Farooq, Umar

doi:10.1145/3196398.3196447

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Determining whether an OSS developer is paid or a volunteer remains a challenge [5,13]. Whereas early studies have relied on self-reporting surveys to characterize OSS communities [32,36,47], in more recent years researchers have started to infer this information from software repository data using heuristics, such as the time at which commits are made [63], the email address domain associated with commits [14,57], or the site_admin flag that can be set for contributors in GitHub organizations [23].…”

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

confidence: 99%

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

confidence: 99%

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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“…Apart from its indirect quality, our analyses show that informality is also a feature of the production of industrial public goods: though a minority of contributors commit, being able to rely on a crowd of micro-contributors whose motivations are not monetary is key for this new kind of non-rival resource. The intermingling of volunteer and paid labour on GitHub has been examined previously (Claes et al, 2018;Riehle et al 2014), but we provided empirical evidence of its temporal evolution both in terms of the growing involvement of employees and of the interplay between volunteer and paid status. Finally our detailed network and content analyses of employee contributions enable us to distinguish between hobby-type and professional contributions by IT firm employees.…”

Section: Firms and Industrial Public Goodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As concerns the evolution of this relationship, they suggested that the number of paid developers remains stable overall as work during leisure time is higher in new projects, and work during office hours higher in more established projects. Claes et al (2018) criticised Riehle et al’s (2014) approach, arguing that considering any commit made on a weekday between 9 am and 5 pm as paid work, and work outside this timeframe as voluntary work, ‘completely ignores unemployment, flexible working hours and overwork’ (p. 437). While this critique has validity, we contend that the time of commits is a valuable heuristic which should not be discarded.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-producing industrial public goods on GitHub: Selective firm cooperation, volunteer-employee labour and participation inequality

O’Neil

Muselli

Cai

et al. 2022

New Media & Society

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The global economy’s digital infrastructure is based on free and open source software. To analyse how firms indirectly collaborate via employee contributions to developer-run projects, we propose a formal definition of ‘industrial public goods’ – inter-firm cooperation, volunteer and paid labour overlap, and participation inequality. We verify its empirical robustness by collecting networks of commits made by firm employees to active GitHub software repositories. Despite paid workers making more contributions, volunteers play a significant role. We find which firms contribute most, which projects benefit from firm investments, and identify distinct ‘contribution territories’ since the two central firms never co-contribute to top-20 repositories. We highlight the challenge posed by ‘Big Tech’ to the non-rival status of industrial public goods, thanks to cloud-based systems which resist sharing, and suggest there may be ‘contribution deserts’ neglected by large information technology firms, despite their importance for the open source ecosystem’s sustainability and diversity.

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Section: Availability and Usagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The toolset is being used by several groups, FOSS foundations, companies and individuals not related to their authors. Some of these uses have lead to research publications, most of them by other groups ( Zhao et al, 2017 ; Claes et al, 2017 ; Mens, Adams & Marsan, 2017 ; Robles et al, 2017 ; Devanbu et al, 2017 ; Claes et al, 2018a ; Claes et al, 2018b ; Kuutila et al, 2018 ; Claes, Mantyla & Farooq, 2018 ; Izquierdo et al, 2019a ; Izquierdo et al, 2019b ; Robles, Gamalielsson & Lundell, 2019 ; Sulun, Tuzun & Dogrusoz, 2019 ; Itkin, Novikov & Yavorskiy, 2019 ; Orviz Fernandez et al, 2020 ; Butler et al, 2020 ; Ashraf et al, 2020 ; Claes & Mantyla, 2020 ; Kuutila, Mantyla & Claes, 2020 ; Sulun, Tuzun & Dogrusoz, 2021 ). GrimoireLab deployments include Cauldron , a SaaS platform which allows users to select repositories to be analyzed via a web interface, producing data in Elasticsearch which is shown in custom Kibana dashboards.…”

Section: Availability and Usagementioning

confidence: 99%

GrimoireLab: A toolset for software development analytics

Dueñas¹,

Cosentino²,

González-Barahona

et al. 2021

PeerJ Computer Science

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Background After many years of research on software repositories, the knowledge for building mature, reusable tools that perform data retrieval, storage and basic analytics is readily available. However, there is still room to improvement in the area of reusable tools implementing this knowledge. Goal To produce a reusable toolset supporting the most common tasks when retrieving, curating and visualizing data from software repositories, allowing for the easy reproduction of data sets ready for more complex analytics, and sparing the researcher or the analyst of most of the tasks that can be automated. Method Use our experience in building tools in this domain to identify a collection of scenarios where a reusable toolset would be convenient, and the main components of such a toolset. Then build those components, and refine them incrementally using the feedback from their use in both commercial, community-based, and academic environments. Results GrimoireLab, an efficient toolset composed of five main components, supporting about 30 different kinds of data sources related to software development. It has been tested in many environments, for performing different kinds of studies, and providing different kinds of services. It features a common API for accessing the retrieved data, facilities for relating items from different data sources, semi-structured storage for easing later analysis and reproduction, and basic facilities for visualization, preliminary analysis and drill-down in the data. It is also modular, making it easy to support new kinds of data sources and analysis. Conclusions We present a mature toolset, widely tested in the field, that can help to improve the situation in the area of reusable tools for mining software repositories. We show some scenarios where it has already been used. We expect it will help to reduce the effort for doing studies or providing services in this area, leading to advances in reproducibility and comparison of results.

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Towards automatically identifying paid open source developers

Cited by 7 publications

References 16 publications

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

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

Co-producing industrial public goods on GitHub: Selective firm cooperation, volunteer-employee labour and participation inequality

GrimoireLab: A toolset for software development analytics

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