2018/03/15 by Jailton Coelho, Marco Túlio Valente, Marco Tulio Valente +4 · 3 voices
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Open Source Software Innovations #Wikis in Education and Collaboration #Software Engineering Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3195836.3195848
The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors of popular GitHub projects. We reveal their motivations to assume a key role in FLOSS projects (e.g., improving the projects because they are also using it), the project characteristics that most helped in their engagement process (e.g., a friendly community), and the barriers faced by the surveyed core developers (e.g., lack of time of the project leaders). We also compare our results with related studies about others kinds of open source contributors (casual, one-time, and newcomers).