一句话：实证比较 Rust 项目中受薪与志愿开发者的贡献特征、长期参与及志愿者的看法。
论文关注企业资助的开源开发者与志愿贡献者因动机不同可能产生冲突并影响项目可持续性。作者以 Rust 项目为案例，通过实证分析比较受薪开发者与志愿者在贡献特征和长期参与上的差异，并调查志愿者对受薪开发者的看法。结果显示：核心受薪开发者贡献更频繁；一次性受薪开发者的提交规模更大；边缘受薪开发者实现更多特性；受薪身份对成为长期贡献者有正向作用。同时，志愿者对受薪开发者存在一定偏见。研究指出“受薪 vs 志愿”的二分法过于简化，还可识别出更多子群体，并建议企业更敏感地参与开源社区。
It is now commonplace for organizations to pay developers to work on specific open source software (OSS) projects to pursue their business goals. Such paid developers work alongside voluntary contributors, but given the different motivations of these two groups of developers, conflict may arise, which may pose a threat to a project's sustainability. This paper presents an empirical study of paid developers and volunteers in Rust, a popular open source programming language project. Rust is a particularly interesting case given considerable concerns about corporate participation. We compare volunteers and paid developers through contribution characteristics and long-term participation, and solicit volunteers' perceptions on paid developers. We find that core paid developers tend to contribute more frequently; commits contributed by onetime paid developers have bigger sizes; peripheral paid developers implement more features; and being paid plays a positive role in becoming a long-term contributor. We also find that volunteers do have some prejudices against paid developers. This study suggests that the dichotomous view of paid vs. volunteer developers is too simplistic and that further subgroups can be identified. Companies should become more sensitive to how they engage with OSS communities, in certain ways as suggested by this study.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot11339,
title = {How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project},
author = {Yuxia Zhang and Mian Qin and Klaas-Jan Stol and Minghui Zhou and Hui Liu},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1145/3597503.3639197}
}