Why We Engage in FLOSS: Answers from Core Developers
This addresses the challenge of attracting and retaining core developers in FLOSS projects, which is incremental as it builds on prior research about open source contributors.
The study surveyed 52 core developers on GitHub to understand their motivations, project characteristics aiding engagement, and barriers faced, comparing results with other contributor types.
The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors of popular GitHub projects. We reveal their motivations to assume a key role in FLOSS projects (e.g., improving the projects because they are also using it), the project characteristics that most helped in their engagement process (e.g., a friendly community), and the barriers faced by the surveyed core developers (e.g., lack of time of the project leaders). We also compare our results with related studies about others kinds of open source contributors (casual, one-time, and newcomers).