Who is forked on GitHub? Collaboration among Open Source developers

Dorota Celińska ()

No 2016-15, Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

Abstract: In this article we investigate which characteristics of the developers involved in the creation of Open Source software favor innovation in the Open Source community. We utilize a unique database, obtained by web-scrapping GitHub from January to March, 2016. The results of the analysis show that higher reputation in the community improves up to a certain degree the probability of gaining collaborators, but developers are also driven by reciprocity, which is consistent with the concept of gift economy. There exists also a statistically significant network effect emerging from the standarization -- developers using the most popular programming languages in the service are likely to have more collaborators. Providing additional contact information improves the chance of having coworkers. The obtained results can be generalized for the population of mature users of GitHub.

Keywords: Open Source; GitHub; fork; collaboration; innovations; reputation; gift economy; network externality; standarization; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D85 L14 L15 L17 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ind, nep-ino and nep-net
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http://www.wne.uw.edu.pl/index.php/download_file/2733/ First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:war:wpaper:2016-15

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