research-article

Peripheral Developer Participation in Open Source Projects: An Empirical Analysis

Authors:

Rajiv Krishnamurthy,

Varghese Jacob,

Suresh Radhakrishnan,

Kutsal DoganAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), Volume 6, Issue 4

Article No.: 14, Pages 1 - 31

https://doi.org/10.1145/2820618

Published: 13 January 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The success of the Open Source model of software development depends on the voluntary participation of external developers (the peripheral developers), a group that can have distinct motivations from that of project founders (the core developers). In this study, we examine peripheral developer participation by empirically examining approximately 2,600 open source projects. In particular, we hypothesize that peripheral developer participation is higher when the potential for building reputation by gaining recognition from project stakeholders is higher. We consider recognition by internal stakeholders (such as core developers) and external stakeholders (such as end-users and peers). We find a positive association between peripheral developer participation and the potential of stakeholder recognition after controlling for bug reports, feature requests, and other key factors. Our findings provide important insights for OSS founders and corporate managers for open sourcing or OSS adoption decisions.

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Index Terms

Peripheral Developer Participation in Open Source Projects: An Empirical Analysis
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management

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cover image ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems Volume 6, Issue 4

January 2016

73 pages

ISSN:2158-656X

EISSN:2158-6578

DOI:10.1145/2869770

Editor:
Alexander Tuzhilin
New York University, USA

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Copyright © 2016 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 13 January 2016

Accepted: 01 September 2015

Revised: 01 June 2015

Received: 01 February 2014

Published in TMIS Volume 6, Issue 4

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Bock TAlznauer NJoblin MApel S(2023)Automatic Core-Developer Identification on GitHub: A Validation StudyACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/359380332:6(1-29)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593803
Tan XZhou MZhang L(2023)Understanding Mentors’ Engagement in OSS Communities via Google Summer of CodeIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.324241549:5(3106-3130)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3242415
Zhang WZhao JPeng RWang SYang Y(2023)SusRec: An Approach to Sustainable Developer Recommendation for Bug Resolution Using Multimodal Ensemble LearningIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2022.317673372:1(61-78)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2022.3176733
Wang LZheng ZWu XSang BZhang JTao XBissyandé TKlein JBird CSarro F(2023)Fork Entropy: Assessing the Diversity of Open Source Software Projects' ForksProceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00168(204-216)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
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