How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project
CoRR(2024)
摘要
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 one-time 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.
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