Why We Engage in FLOSS: Answers from Core Developers

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Citation: Jailton Coelho, Marco Tulio Valente, Luciana L. Silva, Andre Hora (2018/03/15) Why We Engage in FLOSS: Answers from Core Developers.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Why We Engage in FLOSS: Answers from Core Developers
Download: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05741
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Summary

Starting with 5000 most-starred projects on GitHub and removing non-programming, new, and inactive, obtained list of 2262 candidate projects. Identify core contributors to those projects as those with 80% of commits in project as a group, and a minimum of 5% as individuals. Identify new core contributors by excluding last year of commits and recalculating core contributors: new core contributors are only in the previous set. Ended up with 380 new core contributors to 331 projects. Contacted 151 of these contributors who listed a public email address on GitHub; 52 answered survey.

Asked about motivations for and barriers to contributing. Main motivation (60% of responses) was to help project that contributor is a heavy user of. Non-technical barriers were more commonly mentioned than technical barriers, except for small projects.

Authors compare results from this survey with previous work that has asked similar questions of casual contributors and newcomers; these found fixing bugs, as opposed to helping overall project, to be main motivator.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

One implication is that core contributors looking to encourage more core contributors should focus on making great software which will have dedicated users some of whom might be motivated to help project eventually as a core contributor.

Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214025