Refactoring from 9 to 5? What and When Employees and Volunteers Contribute to OSS

In this paper we characterize the contributions made by employees (developers that work for GitHub, the company) and volunteers (developers that use GitHub, the platform) to OSS projects maintained by GitHub (the company) on GitHub (the platform). By mining activities performed in five well-known company-owned OSS projects, we investigate what they do and when they do it. We found that the majority of the volunteers' contributions are related to reengineering (e.g., refactoring), while employees focus more on management (e.g., documentation). When it comes to the working hours, we found that contributions are made mostly from 9am-5pm, even for the volunteers.

[1]  Michele Lanza,et al.  On the nature of commits , 2008, 2008 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering - Workshops.

[2]  Marco Aurélio Gerosa,et al.  More Common Than You Think: An In-depth Study of Casual Contributors , 2016, 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER).

[3]  Dirk Homscheid,et al.  Between organization and community: investigating turnover intention factors of firm-sponsored open source software developers , 2016, WebSci.

[4]  Gustavo Pinto,et al.  The Census of the Brazilian Open-Source Community , 2014, OSS.

[5]  Alexander Hars,et al.  Working for free? Motivations of participating in open source projects , 2001, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[6]  Dirk Riehle,et al.  Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source , 2014, 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[7]  Igor Steinmacher,et al.  Who drives company-owned OSS projects: internal or external members? , 2018, Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society.

[8]  Marco Aurélio Gerosa,et al.  On the challenges of open-sourcing proprietary software projects , 2018, Empirical Software Engineering.

[9]  Sebastian Spaeth,et al.  Carrots and Rainbows: Motivation and Social Practice in Open Source Software Development , 2012, MIS Q..

[10]  Igor Steinmacher,et al.  Who Gets a Patch Accepted First? Comparing the Contributions of Employees and Volunteers , 2018, 2018 IEEE/ACM 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE).

[11]  Audris Mockus,et al.  Inflow and Retention in OSS Communities with Commercial Involvement , 2016, ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol..

[12]  Brian Fitzgerald,et al.  Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects , 2007 .

[13]  Arvind K. Tripathi,et al.  Impact of Financial Benefits on Open Source Software Sustainability , 2016, ICIS.

[14]  Karim R. Lakhani,et al.  Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software , 2005 .