| Title | The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Authors | R. Geiger, Stuart, Dorothy Howard, and Lilly Irani |
| Journal | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | CSCW1 |
| Pagination | 1-28 |
| ISSN | 2573-0142 |
| Abstract | R. STUART GEIGER∗, University of California, San Diego; Department of Communication and Halicioglu Data Science Institute, USA DOROTHY HOWARD, University of California, San Diego; Department of Communication and Feminist Labor Lab, USA LILLY IRANI, University of California, San Diego; Department of Communication, The Design Lab, and Feminist Labor Lab, USA Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly. CCS Concepts: • Social and professional topics → Computer supported cooperative work; Sociotechnical systems; Computing profession; Project and people management; • Software and its engineering → Open source model. |
| URL | https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449249 |
| DOI | 10.1145/3449249 |
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