Abstract
Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.
Highlights
Free and/or open-source software refers to a broad set of working processes, social movements, and organizations that have formed around the production and distribution of software, Authors’ addresses: R
We focused on projects that have become relied upon as infrastructure by others and either are or began as largely based on volunteer labor
We instead illustrate how maintainership differs across different kinds of projects, focusing on how the labor of maintaining a F/OSS project changes as projects develop, grow, and scale
Summary
Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) refers to a broad set of working processes, social movements, and organizations that have formed around the production and distribution of software, Authors’ addresses: R. Our study took place in 2019-2020, during an era of F/OSS that is different to prior decades, when foundational works about F/OSS proliferated. Unlike in firms where employees are directed by managers, these projects often rely on self-directed contributions from individuals or individuals working between private industry and voluntary F/OSS contributor communities. On leadership and F/OSS, more work involves predicting who becomes a leader [48, 59] or leaders’ motivations [82], past work has discussed the roles of leaders, who often resolve conflicts, mentor newcomers, set rules, and organize tasks [4, 30, 74]
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