Why we engage in FLOSS

Coelho, Jailton; Valente, M.; Silva, Luciana L.; Hora, André

doi:10.1145/3195836.3195848

Cited by 29 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Similarly, Barcomb et al [12] found that social norms, satisfaction, and community commitment were supporting factors in episodic volunteers. Coelho et al [19] who studied motivations of core developers mainly had similar results in friendly community and opportunity to engage in volunteer work. By contrast, core developers were also motivated by technical quality, such as improving projects they use, lack of project complexity, and lack of complex or buggy code.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Civic Code for Social Change: Lessons in Civic Tech Grassroots for Software Engineers

et al. 2022

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Civic Code for Social Change: Lessons in Civic Tech Grassroots for Software Engineers

et al. 2022

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“…We adopt the widely used core-periphery structure [31,78] to classify developers' roles based on the commit-based heuristic following previous work [15,39]. Core developers are deemed to account for 80% of commits in Rust.…”

Section: Classifying Developermentioning

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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“…For example, Lee et al [17] investigated the motivations of onetime code contributors and found that developers primarily made contributions to fix bugs that hindered their work. Similarly, Coelho et al [18] reported that the main reason core developers contribute to OSS projects is to improve a project because they are also using it. A recent study by Gerosa et al [19] on the motivations of OSS developers provided evidence that intrinsic and internalized motivations, such as learning and intellectual stimulation, are highly relevant to many developers.…”

Section: Individual Motivation Viewpointsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Giving Back: Contributions Congruent to Library Dependency Changes in a Software Ecosystem

Wattanakriengkrai

Wang

Kula

et al. 2023

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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The widespread adoption of third-party libraries for contemporary software development has led to the creation of large inter-dependency networks, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Maintainers of these libraries are often overworked, relying on the contributions of volunteers to sustain these libraries. To understand these contributions, in this work, we leverage socio-technical techniques to introduce and formalise dependency-contribution congruence (DC congruence) at both ecosystem and library level, i.e., to understand the degree and origins of contributions congruent to dependency changes, analyze whether they contribute to library dormancy (i.e., a lack of activity), and investigate similarities between these congruent contributions compared to typical contributions. We conduct a large-scale empirical study to measure the DC congruence for the npm ecosystem using 1.7 million issues, 970 thousand pull requests (PRs), and over 5.3 million commits belonging to 107,242 npm libraries. We find that the most congruent contributions originate from contributors who can only submit (not commit) to both a client and a library. At the project level, we find that DC congruence shares an inverse relationship with the likelihood that a library becomes dormant. Specifically, a library is less likely to become dormant if the contributions are congruent with upgrading dependencies. Finally, by comparing the source code of contributions, we find statistical differences in the file path and added lines in the source code of congruent contributions when compared to typical contributions. Our work has implications to encourage dependency contributions, especially to support library maintainers in sustaining their projects.

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Why we engage in FLOSS

Cited by 29 publications

References 22 publications

Civic Code for Social Change: Lessons in Civic Tech Grassroots for Software Engineers

Civic Code for Social Change: Lessons in Civic Tech Grassroots for Software Engineers

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

Giving Back: Contributions Congruent to Library Dependency Changes in a Software Ecosystem

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