Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects

Are Bullies More Productive? Empirical Study of Affectiveness vs. Issue Fixing Time

“…Steinmacher et al [8] analyzed social barriers that hampered newcomers' first contributions. These barriers were identified considering a systematic literature review, students contributing to open source projects, and responses collected from OSS projects' contributors.…”

“…We measured sentiment using the state-of-the-art SentiStrength tool 8 , which is able to estimate the degree of positive and negative sentiment in short texts, even for informal language. SentiStrength by default detects two sentiment polarizations:…”

“…We used 3 https:en.wikipedia.orgwikiMain Page 4 http:stackoverflow.com 5 Jira Issue Tracking System https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira 6 http://www.mpi-sws.org/cristian/Politeness.html 7 User's names are reported as <dev name a> for the sake of privacy. 8 http://sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk/ SentiStrenght to measure the sentiment of developers in issue comments (which often are short).…”

“…The fact that people do not work physically in the same location not only makes coordination of tasks more difficult, it requires them to align with colleagues and interpret colleagues' feelings through emails, discussion boards (e.g., issue tracking systems) and conference calls. The exclusive use of such systems and the absence of face to face communication could encourage developers in pursuing impolite communicative behaviour [7], which is known to detract newcomers from a project [8]. Many famous examples of this exist on the Linux kernel mailing list, for example in exchanges between the creator of the Linux kernel and some of the Linux developers 1 .…”

Open Source Projects as Incubators of Innovation: From Niche Phenomenon to Integral Part of the Software Industry

“…By contrast, intrinsically motivated communities such as Arch (Linux distribution) or jEdit (text editor) target their products to very specific user groups, are rather irrelevant to the general market and are run by small teams, due to which they have so far been able to do without pronounced social structures or membership rules ("You can 'join' simply by subscribing to the […] mailing lists"). Still, even smaller developer communities are marked by technical and social contribution barriers, "including steep learning curve, lack of community support, and difficulties finding out how to start" (Steinmacher et al 2015(Steinmacher et al : 1380; and when such communities grow, alongside the intensity of their interactions with external market actors, they too tend to adopt "cathedral-like" organizational modes, regardless of any level of technical efficiency they may have attained. The common denominator of all four project variants is their underlying open source licensing models, which protect their products from direct proprietarization.…”