OSS Myths and Facts
Yukako Iimura, Masanari Kondo, Kazushi Tomoto, Yasutaka Kamei, Naoyasu Ubayashi, Shinobu Saito
TL;DR
The paper investigates six OSS myths related to communication, availability, longevity, security, responsiveness, and developer roles, to extract practical EX lessons for companies. It employs a triple-method approach: empirical repository analysis, literature survey, and interviews, focusing on six myths. Key findings include that communication can be rapid, office-hour bias persists, long-term survival correlates with diversity, vulnerability fixes have non-negligible delays, and roles in OSS are diverse beyond 'top developers.' The work offers actionable guidance for improving EX in corporate software development by adopting inclusive participation, asynchronous collaboration, and structured triage/product-management practices.
Abstract
We have selected six myths about the OSS community and have tested whether they are true or not. The purpose of this report is to identify the lessons that can be learned from the development style of the OSS community and the issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve better Employee Experience (EX) in software development within companies and organizations. The OSS community has been led by a group of skilled developers known as hackers. We have great respect for the engineers and activities of the OSS community and aim to learn from them. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that having high expectations can sometimes result in misunderstandings. When there are excessive expectations and concerns, misunderstandings (referred to as myths) can arise, particularly when individuals who are not practitioners rely on hearsay to understand the practices of practitioners. We selected the myths to be tested based on a literature review and interviews. These myths are held by software development managers and customers who are not direct participants in the OSS community. We answered questions about each myth through: 1) Our own analysis of repository data, 2) A literature survey of data analysis conducted by previous studies, or 3) A combination of the two approaches.