Abstract
The role of non-coding contributors in Open Source Software (OSS) is poorly understood. Most of current research around OSS development focuses on the coding aspects of the project (e.g., commits, pull requests or code reviews) while ignoring the potential of other types of contributions. Often, due to the assumption that these other contributions are not significant in number and that, in any case, they are handled by the same people that are also part of the “coding team”. This paper aims to investigate whether this is actually the case by analyzing the frequency and diversity of non-coding contributions in OSS development. As a sample of projects for our study we have taken the 100 most popular projects in the ecosystem of NPM, a package manager for JavaScript. Our results validate the importance of dedicated non-coding contributors in OSS and the diversity of OSS communities as, typically, a contributor specializes in a specific subset of roles. We foresee that projects adopting explicit policies to attract and onboard them could see a positive impact in their long-term sustainability providing they also put in place the right governance strategies to facilitate the migration and collaboration among the different roles. As part of this work, we also provide a replicability package to facilitate further quantitative role-based analysis by other researchers.
Highlights
Open Source Software (OSS) is the infrastructure on which our digital society relies (Eghbal 2016)
Beyond the main conclusions reported so far, we would like to highlight some additional insights derived from the results and the feedback we got when sharing these results with a few developers involved in Open Source projects, including the leaders of three of the projects analyzed in this study
This paper has analyzed the different roles participating in Open Source development by providing a precise role definition for a quantitative role-based analysis of Open Source projects
Summary
Open Source Software (OSS) is the infrastructure on which our digital society relies (Eghbal 2016). Many critical Open Source projects suffer from grave sustainability issues as many people use the software but very few contribute to it. The vast majority focus on the study of user profiles aimed at contributing code and taking care of other technical tasks (e.g., review or merge code) for the project. This is only a partial view of what should constitute (and make advances) an Open Source project, which generally builds upon a community of users with a rich variety of profiles. Everybody is invited to help even if they cannot write code, helping on the sustainability of OSS projects; to collaborate on marketing, promotion and design aspects and to help writing documentation or participate in the discussions about the future evolution of the project (e.g., features to implement )
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