How Successful Are Open Source Contributions From Countries with Different Levels of Human Development?
This study identifies a potential bias in open-source contribution acceptance for developers from countries with lower human development, impacting their participation and recognition.
This paper investigated the relationship between a developer's country of origin and the acceptance rate of their pull requests in open-source projects. They found that developers from countries with low Human Development Indexes (HDI) contribute a small fraction of pull requests and experience the highest rejection rates.
Are Brazilian developers less likely to have a contribution accepted than their peers from, say, the United Kingdom? In this paper we studied whether the developers' location relates to the outcome of a pull request. We curated the locations of 14k contributors who performed 44k pull requests to 20 open source projects. Our results indeed suggest that developers from countries with low human development indexes (HDI) not only perform a small fraction of the overall pull requests, but they also are the ones that face rejection the most.