Search results

To remain sustainable, open source software (OSS) projects must attract new members—or newcomers—who make contributions. In this paper, the authors develop a set of hypotheses based on the knowledge barriers framework that examines how OSS communities can encourage contributions from newcomers.

Employing longitudinal data from the source code repositories of 232 OSS projects over a two-year period, the authors employ a Poisson-based mixed model to test how community characteristics, such as the main drivers of knowledge-based costs, relate to newcomers' contributions.

The results indicate that community characteristics, such as programming language choice, documentation effort and code structure instability, are the main drivers of knowledge-based contribution costs. The findings also suggest that managing these costs can result in more inclusive OSS communities, as evidenced by the number of contributing newcomers; the authors highlight the importance of maintaining documentation efforts for OSS communities.

This paper assumes that motivational factors are a necessary but insufficient condition for newcomer participation in OSS projects and that the cost to participation should be considered. Using the knowledge barriers framework, this paper identifies the main knowledge-based costs that hinder newcomer participation. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study that does not limit data collection to a single hosting platform (e.g., SourceForge), which improves the generalizability of the findings.

This study aims to highlight the challenges and opportunities of using GitHub as a data source in both research and programming education.

This study provides general overview of the challenges and opportunities faced while conducting empirical research using GitHub as a data source. The challenges and opportunities are framed using the input–process–output model of open-source software.

GitHub data accessed from the application programming interface (API) can have several limitations, which can be overcome by Web scraping and using external data repositories such as GHArchive and GHTorrent. There are also several idiosyncrasies about GitHub that researchers need to be aware of to be able to use the data effectively, which can represent an opportunity for research. The challenges and opportunities are summarized for the licenses, community, development process and product of free/libra and open-source software communities hosted on GitHub.

This study provides a summary of GitHub-related challenges and opportunities that researchers can leverage to improve their empirical research. Furthermore, this summary can be a valuable resource for instructors that plan to use GitHub as a data source in their data-focused programming courses.