Abstract

Open source development is labelled with free source, fast evolution and extensive user collaboration. Previous studies primarily touched on user activities in a few well‐known open source projects but lack the empirical data to represent important issues facing the open source development community. This paper reports on a survey‐based study that investigated user collaboration in open source development. Among the many interesting results, we found open source users themselves to be very experienced software developers. They are highly motivated to make their own contributions, work closely with developers on various tasks, and use electronic communication tools extensively. Users with different development experience and contributing to different category of projects tend to exhibit different motivations and behaviours. These findings confirm the differences between traditional and open source user collaboration and their implications for future open source evolution and management are given and discus...

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