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How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project

Yuxia Zhang, Mian Qin, Klaas-Jan Stol, Minghui Zhou, Hui Liu

TL;DR

This study investigates how paid and volunteer Open Source Software developers differ within the Rust project, addressing concerns about corporate participation and project sustainability. It combines a large-scale commit-based analysis (112,969 commits from 4,117 authors, including 250 paid developers) with a volunteer survey and a robust identity/affiliation inference pipeline to test hypotheses about contribution frequency, commit size, and task focus, as well as long-term contribution likelihood. Key findings show that paid developers, particularly in core roles, contribute more frequently; one-time paid contributors tend to push larger commits and feature work, and being paid increases the odds of becoming a long-term contributor, challenging the idea that paid and volunteer contributors form distinct, static groups. The study offers governance and design recommendations (e.g., transparency dashboards, thoughtful task assignment) to harmonize corporate participation with OSS community norms and sustainability, and it highlights the existence of meaningful subgroups beyond a simple paid-vs-volunteer dichotomy.

Abstract

It is now commonplace for organizations to pay developers to work on specific open source software (OSS) projects to pursue their business goals. Such paid developers work alongside voluntary contributors, but given the different motivations of these two groups of developers, conflict may arise, which may pose a threat to a project's sustainability. This paper presents an empirical study of paid developers and volunteers in Rust, a popular open source programming language project. Rust is a particularly interesting case given considerable concerns about corporate participation. We compare volunteers and paid developers through contribution characteristics and long-term participation, and solicit volunteers' perceptions on paid developers. We find that core paid developers tend to contribute more frequently; commits contributed by one-time paid developers have bigger sizes; peripheral paid developers implement more features; and being paid plays a positive role in becoming a long-term contributor. We also find that volunteers do have some prejudices against paid developers. This study suggests that the dichotomous view of paid vs. volunteer developers is too simplistic and that further subgroups can be identified. Companies should become more sensitive to how they engage with OSS communities, in certain ways as suggested by this study.

How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project

TL;DR

This study investigates how paid and volunteer Open Source Software developers differ within the Rust project, addressing concerns about corporate participation and project sustainability. It combines a large-scale commit-based analysis (112,969 commits from 4,117 authors, including 250 paid developers) with a volunteer survey and a robust identity/affiliation inference pipeline to test hypotheses about contribution frequency, commit size, and task focus, as well as long-term contribution likelihood. Key findings show that paid developers, particularly in core roles, contribute more frequently; one-time paid contributors tend to push larger commits and feature work, and being paid increases the odds of becoming a long-term contributor, challenging the idea that paid and volunteer contributors form distinct, static groups. The study offers governance and design recommendations (e.g., transparency dashboards, thoughtful task assignment) to harmonize corporate participation with OSS community norms and sustainability, and it highlights the existence of meaningful subgroups beyond a simple paid-vs-volunteer dichotomy.

Abstract

It is now commonplace for organizations to pay developers to work on specific open source software (OSS) projects to pursue their business goals. Such paid developers work alongside voluntary contributors, but given the different motivations of these two groups of developers, conflict may arise, which may pose a threat to a project's sustainability. This paper presents an empirical study of paid developers and volunteers in Rust, a popular open source programming language project. Rust is a particularly interesting case given considerable concerns about corporate participation. We compare volunteers and paid developers through contribution characteristics and long-term participation, and solicit volunteers' perceptions on paid developers. We find that core paid developers tend to contribute more frequently; commits contributed by one-time paid developers have bigger sizes; peripheral paid developers implement more features; and being paid plays a positive role in becoming a long-term contributor. We also find that volunteers do have some prejudices against paid developers. This study suggests that the dichotomous view of paid vs. volunteer developers is too simplistic and that further subgroups can be identified. Companies should become more sensitive to how they engage with OSS communities, in certain ways as suggested by this study.
Paper Structure (28 sections, 5 figures, 6 tables)

This paper contains 28 sections, 5 figures, 6 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work and Hypotheses
  3. Paid and Volunteer OSS Developers
  4. Becoming Long-Term Contributors
  5. Perceptions on Paid Developers
  6. Study Design
  7. Data Collection
  8. Data Cleaning
  9. Merging Multiple Identities
  10. Identifying Paid Developers
  11. Comparing Paid and Volunteer Developers
  12. Measuring Contribution Performance
  13. Classifying Developer Roles
  14. Comparing Differences
  15. Modeling Long-Term Contributors
  16. ...and 13 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Distribution of paid developers and volunteers with one-time, peripheral, and core roles, respectively.
  • Figure 2: LOC distributions of paid developers and volunteers in one-time, peripheral, and core groups
  • Figure 3: Task distributions of one-time developers
  • Figure 4: Contribution frequency distributions of paid developers and volunteers in peripheral and core groups.
  • Figure 5: Task distributions of peripheral developers