谁激励了谁？对开源软件新手和经验丰富的开源软件从业者的调查
What Motivates Whom? A Survey of Newcomers to OSS and Experienced OSS Practitioners
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中文总结 AI 辅助
研究开源项目贡献者的项目选择偏好，通过对208名从业者在线调查，分析其与动机、人口背景的关联，对比新手和经验者偏好差异，探讨推荐系统改进方向，为提升贡献者相关情况及完善开源生态提供参考。
中文摘要 AI 辅助
开源软件开发持续扩张，但软件从业者在选择合适项目时常常遇到困难，导致入职效率低下和参与度不高。了解贡献者如何选择开源项目对于支持其入职、参与度及在开源社区的长期参与至关重要。本研究调查了开源项目中贡献者的项目选择偏好，并考察这些偏好如何与贡献者的动机和人口统计学背景相关联。通过对208名从业者的在线调查，发现年龄、性别等人口因素与动机显著相关。此外，对项目年龄、开发阶段和文档质量等项目特征的偏好因具体动机而异。重要的是，通过比较视角分别分析开源新手和经验丰富从业者的回答以揭示不同偏好。最后探讨了软件从业者对现有推荐系统如何更好支持项目选择并符合其动机的看法。通过剖析开源新手和从业者的独特需求，研究结果为改进贡献者入职、参与度和留存率提供了见解，也为未来项目推荐系统及改善开源生态系统提供了参考。
英文摘要
Open source software (OSS) development continues to expand, yet software practitioners often struggle to select suitable projects, leading to inefficient onboarding and disengagement. Understanding how contributors select OSS projects is important for supporting contributors onboarding, engagement, and long-term participation within OSS communities. This study investigates contributors' project-selection preferences in OSS projects and examines how these preferences correlate with contributors' motivations and demographic backgrounds. Through an online survey of 208 practitioners, we found that demographic factors, such as age, gender, and the OSS role they held, significantly correlate with their motivations. Additionally, preferences for project characteristics such as project age, development stage, and documentation quality vary based on specific motivations. Importantly, our findings are presented through a comparative lens, analyzing the responses of newcomers to OSS and experienced OSS practitioners separately to uncover their distinct preferences. Lastly, we explore software practitioners' perspectives on how existing recommendation systems could better support project selection and align with their motivations. By disentangling the unique needs of newcomers to OSS and OSS practitioners, our findings provide insights for researchers, OSS project owners, and software practitioners to improve contributor onboarding, engagement, and retention, while also informing future project recommendation systems and improving the OSS ecosystem.
