You get what you pay for: Paid contributors drive open source

What's the difference between a paid contributor to a FOSS project and a volunteer contributor? According to a paper by Evangelia Berdou, quite a bit. Berdou finds that paid developers take up key positions in projects, while volunteers often work on the periphery. In other words -- much of the heavy lifting in open source is done thanks to corporations that have an interest in open source.

I ran across this paper thanks to a post by former Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr. The paper, "Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects," (PDF) looks at GNOME and KDE in depth.Michlmayr pointsout:

She found that paid developers are often identified with the core developer group which is responsible for key infrastructure and often make a large number of commits. Furthermore, she suggested that the groups may have different priorities: "whereas [paid] developers focus on technical excellence, peripheral contributors are more interested in access and practical use".

It's easy to understand why this is:

• Core contributions require more time and expertise than peripheral contributions.
• Core contributors are desirable employees. Everyone wants to hire the contributors who can and do influence the projects.
• Volunteers can work on "peripheral" aspects of projects that can be performed in volunteer-sized chunks of time. Which is to say, a few hours a week on average.

Both are important -- the core contributors may do a huge amount of work, but the casual contributions (as pointed out in Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody") have a lot to do with the success of open source as well.

It's possible that the conclusions would be different if examining other major FOSS projects, but I doubt they'd be much different. The answers don't really surprise me, but I am glad to see some honest research being done in this area. (Gut feelings and anecdotal evidence are only worth so much...)

Berdou's paper is quite a handful, at more than 200 pages. I'm looking forward to digging into it in more detail on the way back from Tokyo tomorrow.