Open Source Software (OSS) development is a collaborative endeavor where expert developers, distributed around the globe create software solutions. Given this characteristic, OSS communities have been studied as technical communities, where stakeholders join and evolve in their careers based on their (often voluntary) code contributions to the project. However, the OSS landscape is slowly changing with more people and companies getting involved in OSS. This means that projects now need people in non-technical roles and activities to keep the project sustainable and evolving. In this paper, we focus on understanding the roles and activities that are part of the current OSS landscape and the different career pathways in OSS. By conducting and analyzing 17 interviews with OSS contributors who are well known in the community, we provide empirical evidence of the existence and importance of community-centric roles (e.g advocate, license manager, community founder) in addition to the well-known project-centric ones (e.g maintainer, core member). However, the community-centric roles typically remain hidden, since these roles may not leave traces in software repositories typically analyzed by researchers. We found that people can build a career in OSS through different roles and activities, with different backgrounds, including those not related to writing software. Furthermore, people's career pathways are fluid, moving between project and community-centric roles. Our work highlights that communities and researchers need to take action to acknowledge the importance of these varied roles, making these roles visible and well-recognized, which can ultimately help attract and retain more people in the OSS projects.

Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field's understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from the early 2000s. With the changed landscape of OSS, it is very likely that motivations to join OSS have also evolved. Through a survey of 242 OSS contributors, we investigate shifts in motivation from three perspectives: (1) the impact of the new OSS landscape, (2) the impact of individuals' personal growth as they become part of OSS communities, and (3) the impact of differences in individuals' demographics. Our results show that some motivations related to social aspects and reputation increased in frequency and that some intrinsic and internalized motivations, such as learning and intellectual stimulation, are still highly relevant. We also found that contributing to OSS often transforms extrinsic motivations to intrinsic, and that while experienced contributors often shift toward altruism, novices often shift toward career, fun, kinship, and learning. OSS projects can leverage our results to revisit current strategies to attract and retain contributors, and researchers and tool builders can better support the design of new studies and tools to engage and support OSS development.

No abstract

No abstract

Women are underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, as a result of which, not only do women lose career and skill development opportunities, but the projects themselves suffer from a lack of diversity of perspectives. Practitioners and researchers need to understand more about the phenomenon; however, studies about women in open source are spread across multiple fields, including information systems, software engineering, and social science. This article systematically maps, aggregates, and synthesizes the state-of-the-art on women’s participation in OSS. It focuses on women contributors’ representation and demographics, how they contribute, their motivations and challenges, and strategies employed by communities to attract and retain women. We identified 51 articles (published between 2000 and 2021) that investigated women’s participation in OSS. We found evidence in these papers about who are the women who contribute, what motivates them to contribute, what types of contributions they make, challenges they face, and strategies proposed to support their participation. According to these studies, only about 5% of projects were reported to have women as core developers, and women authored less than 5% of pull-requests, but had similar or even higher rates of pull-request acceptances than men. Women make both code and non-code contributions, and their motivations to contribute include learning new skills, altruism, reciprocity, and kinship. Challenges that women face in OSS are mainly social, including lack of peer parity and non-inclusive communication from a toxic culture. We found 10 strategies reported in the literature, which we mapped to the reported challenges. Based on these results, we provide guidelines for future research and practice.