Prof. Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source [HICSS 2014]

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Abstract: Many open source projects have long become commercial. This paper shows just how much of open source software development is paid work and how much has remained volunteer work. Using a conservative approach, we find that about 50% of all open source software development has been paid work for many years now and that many small projects are fully paid for by companies. However, we also find that any non-trivial project balances the amount of paid developer with volunteer work, and we suggest that the ratio of volunteer to paid work can serve as an indicator for the health of open source projects and aid the management of the respective communities.

Keywords: Open source software, empirical software engineering, volunteer open source, paid open source, software labor economics

Reference: Dirk Riehle, Philipp Riemer, Carsten Kolassa, Michael Schmidt. “Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source.” In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS 2014). IEEE Press, 2014. Page 3286-3295.

The paper is available as a PDF file.

Comments

  1. Company Support for Open Source Stable for 15 Years Now?! – Software Research and the Industry

    […] are paid by their employers to work on open source software. This confirms a 2013 paper on paid vs. volunteer work in open source of ours, which also suggested that about half of all development takes place on company time. The […]

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  2. Troubles with the Open Source Gig Economy and Sustainability Tip Jar | Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

    […] like to make the argument that we are better off today than we were in the past. In fact, some research shows that “about 50% of all open source software development has been paid work for many years […]

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  3. Paid vs. Volunteer Open Source Work in China (Projects) 3 / 3 – Software Research and the Industry

    […] just finished redoing our original analysis of paid vs. volunteer work in open source for Gitee, a Chinese-dominated code hosting platform from China. We wanted to understand where […]

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  4. Paid vs. Volunteer Open Source Work in China 1 / 3 – Software Research and the Industry

    […] 2014 we published a study on paid vs. volunteer work in open source, using a representative sample of open source projects from 2008 (i.e. before GitHub). In 2008, […]

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  5. Current Open Source Publications of General Interest – Software Research and the Industry

    […] Dirk; Riemer, Philipp; Kolassa, Carsten; Schmidt, Michael (2014). Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source. In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS 2014). IEEE […]

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  6. Nick Yeates (@nyeates) Avatar
    Nick Yeates (@nyeates)

    Amazing work that I have continually utilized to express realities in the open source software development ecosystem. Please do keep this work and its data up for perpetuity.

    Reply
    1. Dirk Riehle Avatar
      Dirk Riehle

      Wow, thanks Nick! Yes, I intend to keep this blog around at this address for as long as I can 🙂

      Reply
  7. 开源项目就是一个朝九晚五的工作？ | | Evolution Unit 进化Evolution Unit 进化

    […] Dirk Riehle 博士最近的学术报告，开发人员在工作时间从事开源，至少有一半是要付费的。如果依照 Linux […]

    Reply
  8. The Limits of Paid Editing in Wikipedia: Interview with Dirk Franke |

    […] a very recent study on “Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source” (PDF), Dirk Riehle and others found that “about 50% of all open source software […]

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  9. Interview mit Dirk Franke über “Grenzen der Bezahlung” in der Wikipedia

    […] ein nebeneinander von bezahlten und unbezahlten Beitragenden (vgl. z.B. eine aktuelle Studie “Paid versus Volunteer Work in Open Source” von Dirk Riehle und anderen) – warum ist das im Bereich der Wikipedia […]

    Reply
  10. mohammad Avatar
    mohammad

    I really like the idea of this paper.

    Reply

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