Towards the Roles and Motives of Open Source Software Developers.
Ruvar Spauwen, Slinger Jansen · 2013
The software ecosystems of current web browsers include thousands of extensions, which provide additional and customized features for end users and which can generate stronger loyalty towards the browser. Not much research has been done on the development of browser extensions and, in particular, why developers chose to develop for a certain browser. Hence, this research tries to do so by (1) investigating and proposing a set of single platform developer roles and (2) looking more closely at the subset of developers that have developed for multiple platforms, including their behavioral patterns. The selection of browsers consists of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and the researched dataset includes all identified browser extension projects on the web-based hosting service Github between the years 2007 and 2012. The goal of this research is to propose a set of methods that enable clear and meaningful categorization of open source software developers. Consequently, these methods could be seen as stepping stones towards more qualitative-based research, such as: investigating the motives of specific category of developers for contributing to an ecosystem, which can lead to more effective input for controlling or at least influencing an ecosystem’s health.