skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects
Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1947213
PAR ID:
10320477
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume:
5
Issue:
CSCW1
ISSN:
2573-0142
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; (, Empirical Software Engineering)
    Abstract Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management. To analyze these effects, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. We also interviewed 12 practitioners, including open-source maintainers and contributors. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. From the developers’ perspective, these effects are explained by the transparency and confidence the bot comments introduce, in addition to the changes in the discussion focused on pull requests. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2022))
    [Background] Selecting an appropriate task is challenging for Open Source Software (OSS) project newcomers and a variety of strategies can help them in this process. [Aims] In this research, we compare the perspective of maintainers, newcomers, and existing contributors about the importance of strategies to support this process. Our goal is to identify possible gulfs of expectations between newcomers who are meant to be helped and contributors who have to put effort into these strategies, which can create friction and impede the usefulness of the strategies. [Method] We interviewed maintainers (n=17) and applied inductive qualitative analysis to derive a model of strategies meant to be adopted by newcomers and communities. Next, we sent a questionnaire (n=64) to maintainers, frequent contributors, and newcomers, asking them to rank these strategies based on their importance. We used the Schulze method to compare the different rankings from the different types of contributors. [Results] Maintainers and contributors diverged in their opinions about the relative importance of various strategies. The results suggest that newcomers want a better contribution process and more support to onboard, while maintainers expect to solve questions using the available communication channels. [Conclusions] The gaps in perspectives between newcomers and existing contributors create a gulf of expectation. OSS communities can leverage our results to prioritize the strategies considered the most important by newcomers. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2020))
    null (Ed.)
    Although Open Source Software (OSS) maintainers devote a significant proportion of their work to coding tasks, great maintainers must excel in many other activities beyond coding. Maintainers should care about fostering a community, helping new members to find their place, while also saying “no” to patches that although are well-coded and well-tested, do not contribute to the goal of the project. To perform all these activities masterfully, maintainers should exercise attributes that software engineers (working on closed source projects) do not always need to master. This paper aims to uncover, relate, and prioritize the unique attributes that great OSS maintainers might have. To achieve this goal, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with well-experienced maintainers that are the gatekeepers of notable projects such as the Linux Kernel, the Debian operating system, and the GitLab coding platform. After we analyzed the interviews and curated a list of attributes, we created a conceptual framework to explain how these attributes are connected. We then conducted a rating survey with 90 OSS contributors. We noted that “technical excellence” and “communication” are the most recurring attributes. When grouped, these attributes fit into four broad categories: management, social, technical, and personality. While we noted that “sustain a long term vision of the project” and being “extremely careful” seem to form the basis of our framework, we noted through our survey that the communication attribute was perceived as the most essential one. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    Much of our modern digital infrastructure relies critically upon open sourced software. The communities responsible for building this cyberinfrastructure require maintenance and moderation, which is often supported by volunteer efforts. Moderation, as a non-technical form of labor, is a necessary but often overlooked task that maintainers undertake to sustain the community around an OSS project. This study examines the various structures and norms that support community moderation, describes the strategies moderators use to mitigate conflicts, and assesses how bots can play a role in assisting these processes. We interviewed 14 practitioners to uncover existing moderation practices and ways that automation can provide assistance. Our main contributions include a characterization of moderated content in OSS projects, moderation techniques, as well as perceptions of and recommendations for improving the automation of moderation tasks. We hope that these findings will inform the implementation of more effective moderation practices in open source communities. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, ACM)
    The involvement of companies and public institutions in open-source software (OSS) has become widespread. While studies have explored the business models of for-profit organizations and their impact on software quality, little is known about their influence on OSS communities, especially in terms of diversity and inclusion. This knowledge gap is significant, considering that many organizations have the resources to enhance diversity and inclusion internally, but whether these efforts extend to OSS remains uncertain. To address this gap, we conducted interviews with maintainers of community-owned and organization-owned OSS projects, revealing tensions between organizations and their projects and identifying the impact of internal policies on OSS communities. Our findings reveal that, on the one hand, organization-owned projects often restrict external contributions due to stringent operating procedures and segmented communication, leading to limited external engagement. On the other hand, these organizations positively influence diversity and inclusion, notably in the representation and roles of women and the implementation of mentorship programs. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email