Understanding the process of participating in open source communities

Authors:
Bianca Shibuya;Tetsuo Tamai
Affiliations:
The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Building 15, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Building 15, Tokyo, Japan
Venue:
FLOSS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development
Year:
2009

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Abstract

The number of participants in Open Source Software (OSS) communities has increased. Not only volunteers participate, but also companies and their employees. The motivation of the participants vary from extrinsic to intrinsic values. Community-managed and sponsored OSS projects try to explore these motivations to attract and keep these participants. This paper analyses three different OSS projects: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, and GNOME. Each has a different organizational structure that influences participants behavior. This study analyzes qualitative data from publicly available documents, such as project's wiki pages and project's webpages, and quantitative data from bug tracking systems and source code repositories. One of our findings is that the number of active developers does not change significantly when the total number of committers increases for the selected OSS projects.