Motivation of Newcomers to FLOSS Projects Christoph Hannebauer Volker Gruhn paluno – The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology University of Duisburg-Essen {christoph.hannebauer | volker.gruhn}@paluno.uni-due.de ABSTRACT point for the larger survey presented in this paper. While the motivations of Free/Libre and Open Source Soft- Especially when looking at newcomers, contributor motiva- ware (FLOSS) developers have been the subject of extensive tion splits into two different types. First, FLOSS developers research, the motivations for their initial contribution to have a motivation to modify the FLOSS component, which a FLOSS project has received only little attention. This we call modification motivation. Second, they had a mo- survey of 94 newcomers to the FLOSS projects Mozilla and tivation to submit their modification back to the FLOSS GNOME identifies the motivations for the modification of project. This is the submission motivation. As a consequence, the FLOSS components and for the submission of these mod- some newcomers modify a FLOSS component, but never sub- ifications back to the FLOSS project. With the responses, we mit their modification to the FLOSS project, because their test a hypothesis based on the previous qualitative research submission motivation does not suffice. To our knowledge, on newcomer motivations: Most newcomers modify a com- Shah’s survey [22] and our exploratory survey [9] are again ponent because they need the modification for themselves. the only surveys so far that looked at these two different Surprisingly, this is not the case for our respondents, who types of motivation. have a variety of primary modification motivations. New- Raymond proposed that “every good work of software comer occupation is discussed as a reason for this difference starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch” [20]. Indeed, to previous results. the most important modification motivation for the respon- dents of the exploratory survey was their Own Need: They needed the modification for their own use of the application. CCS Concepts This is also in agreement with Shah’s qualitative results [22]. •Software and its engineering → Open source model; This may be a general rule for modification motivations, which we formulate as the following research hypothesis: Keywords Hypothesis: Most first-time contributors modify the FLOSS project’s source code primarily because they need FLOSS; Open Source; Motivation; Newcomers; Survey the modification for themselves. This paper presents a survey of 94 newcomers to FLOSS 1. INTRODUCTION projects to explore their contributor motivations. In particu- Some developers of Free/Libre and Open Source Software lar, the survey statistically tests the mentioned hypothesis, (FLOSS) are altruists, others want to learn something, and which was formerly based only on qualitative research. yet others are simply paid for their work. The motivation of FLOSS developers has been the subject of extensive research. 2. RELATED WORK Most motivation surveys looked at developers that cur- rently worked in their FLOSS projects, but not on the initial FLOSS contributor motivation has been a domain of ex- motivations to join a FLOSS project. Their results are there- tensive research over the course of the last about 15 years. fore likely biased towards the views of a small, but very Von Krogh et al. summarized the state of research as of 2011 visible minority of expert contributors, while newcomers are on FLOSS contributor motivation with more details in a lit- less visible and thus harder to reach. We know of only two erature review [26]. This section describes the main concepts exceptions. First, Shah [22] explicitly distinguished between and studies, especially in regard to new contributors. the motivation for initial and long-term participation. Sec- Early work on developer motivation includes Lerner and ond is an exploratory survey [9] that we used as the starting Tirole’s theoretical application of economic theories to the FLOSS phenomenon [15]. They explored reasons to explain Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or the FLOSS phenomenon without stressing altruistic motiva- classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation tions and found egoistic reasons to work in FLOSS projects. on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the They argued that there is a signaling incentive for FLOSS author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or developers, as they increase their market value if they demon- republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. strate their programming skills in a FLOSS project. OpenSym ’16, August 17 - 19, 2016, Berlin, Germany Ye and Kishida [30] agreed that altruism is not the main motivation for FLOSS developers, but they argued that learn- c 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4451-7/16/08. $15.00 ing and social recognition are the most important intrinsic DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2957792.2957793 and extrinsic motivations for FLOSS developers. A number of surveys asked software developers about their Figure1 shows the identification and invitation process motivations to contribute to FLOSS projects. According exemplary for GNOME. In the first step, we used scripts pre- to Hertel et al. [11] and Hars and Ou [10], the enjoyment sented by Zhou and Mockus [31] to download the data from of programming is a major motivator for most developers. Mozilla’s and GNOME’s issue trackers. An additional script Besides this, pragmatic reasons such as needing the modifi- and a Java application created a list of developers sorted by cation for their own project were most often mentioned not their first acceptance of a patch (FA). Those with a recent just in Hertel et al.’s, but also Lakhani and Wolf’s survey [13]. FA were participant candidated, but had to be filtered manu- Improvement of one’s own programming skills was also fre- ally because the automated scripts had incorrectly identified quently cited in these studies, and seems to be an important some candidates as newcomers. For example if they had factor in starting FLOSS project involvement according to changed their email address recently, the account with the Gosh [8]. David et al. found particularly high numbers of new email address might be seen as a newcomer. Employees developers driven by the belief that source code should be of Mozilla had also been filtered out, as their motivation was open, and they should return something to the community not in the scope of this study. for using it [4]. The invitations included a manually written summary of As Krishnamurthy pointed out [12], these surveys do not their first accepted patch. This added personalization to the differentiate between different types of tasks within FLOSS invitation and showed that it was not just an unsolicited projects. Types of tasks include but are not limited to us- mass email. According to the TDM, each first invitation also age of the component, modification of the source code, and contained a $ 2 gift code for amazon.com. submission of resulting patches. Exceptions include a survey In total, we send out 132 invitations to Mozilla newcomers of the motivation of active users instead of the developers and 48 to GNOME newcomers. We received 97 answers from within a FLOSS project [14], an analysis of the social struc- Mozilla contributors and 32 from GNOME contributors, out ture in FLOSS projects [3], and Benbya and Belbaly [1] also of which 91 and 26 contained a large proportion of useful addressed this in a more recent survey of Sourceforge [23] answers, respectively. This is a total response rate of 65 %, developers. Mair et al. [16] differentiated two types of tasks, which is considerably higher than all other surveys of FLOSS source code contributions and mailing list participation in developers that we know of, which achieved a response rate the community of the statistical FLOSS project R. However, of 38.1 % at most [1, 10, 13, 16, 27–29]. However, beside the they considered only three types of motivation: intrinsic, part of the survey presented in this paper, the survey also extrinsic, and hybrid. They showed that hybrid motivations contained questions regarding contribution barriers. Between have stronger effects on participation, and particularly ex- 71 and 94 participants responded to the questions considered trinsic motivation is even negatively associated with mailing in this paper, so the response rate relevant for this paper is list participation. only between 39.4 % and 52.2 %, which is still very high for In a qualitative empirical study using mailing lists and 88 a survey of FLOSS developers. interviews as data sources, Shah [22] found that the primary This paper cites respondents to the questionnaire directly usage and modification motivations are the developers’ own and indirectly. In these citations, a symbol “[Mn]” for Mozilla need, as they need the modification for themselves. Another or “[Gn]” for GNOME identifies the quoted respondent, identified reason is enjoyment of the coding task. However, where n is a number assigned arbitrarily to each respon- the modification motivation of newcomers was “need” in dent within the groups of Mozilla and GNOME. 42 out of 45 cases in her data set, i.e. they modified the application because they wanted to use the modification 4. QUESTIONNAIRE for themselves. Submission motivations were different and The questionnaire asks for modification and submission comparable to existing studies. Shah acknowledged that motivation. Additionally, it asks for usage motivation, i.e. there are developers who modify the application but do not why the participants approached the FLOSS project in the submit their modifications back to the FLOSS project, which first place.