Who Drives Company-Owned OSS Projects: Internal or External Members?

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Sets realistic expectations for open-sourcing a product: external volume can be substantial, but employees may need to staff core maintenance, review, integration, and community stewardship.

Reported result

What the study found

Internal developers made 43.3% of pull requests and external developers 56.7%; employees still held central roles despite external support. Most external developers were casual single-contribution participants, while some external members handled core activities such as triage, review, and integration.

Research question

What the authors investigated

How do employee/internal and volunteer/external developers participate in company-owned OSS projects, and who occupies central roles?

Design

Case study of five projects; repository pull-request analysis plus manual analysis of accepted pull requests.

Sample and setting

Atom, Electron, Hubot, Git LFS, and Linguist; approximately 12,000 pull-request contributions and approximately 500 manually inspected accepted pull requests.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

Convenience sample of five company-owned projects and repository-visible contributions; results may not generalize to other governance or product settings.

Research sources

Fetched Springer open-access publisher page establishes metadata, DOI, authors, five-project context, contribution counts, methods, and findings in the abstract. Firecrawl research job 01a1436c-f86b-77df-af1c-9a2f87e3535e returned this citation and metadata.