An esplorative study of skills and openness in Open Source Software projects

This paper is about Open-Source Software projects and individual contributors. We aim to show the association between skill profiles and roles assigned to different contributors. Moreover, our analysis focuses on the implications for project performance of members’ skill heterogeneity and the share of external contributors, as a measure of the project’s embeddedness. Our empirical analysis draws on a large sample of Open Source Software projects. For each project we have information about individual contributors such as skills and roles assigned. Key variables at the project level are the number of core members and peripheral contributors, the level of skills, the number of intended audiences (e.g., developers and end-users), and various measures of activity (e.g., number of file releases and bugs closed). We conduct a multinomial logit analysis to predict the role played by individual contributors (e.g., developers and project managers). We also estimate the contribution of skills and openness to projects’ survival and activity