Voting for bugs in Firefox: a voice for Mom and Dad?

Jean-Michel Dalle and Matthijs Den-Besten ()
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Matthijs Den-Besten: CRG - Centre de recherche en gestion - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: In this paper, we present preliminary evidence suggesting that the voting mechanism implemented by the open-source Firefox community is a means to provide a supplementary voice to mainstream users. This evidence is drawn from a sample of bug-reports and from information on voters both found within the bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) for Firefox. Although voting is known to be a relatively common feature within the governance structure of many open-source communities, our paper suggests that it also plays a role as a bridge between the mainstream users in the periphery of the community and developers at the core: voters who do not participate in other activities within the community, the more peripheral, tend to vote for the more user-oriented Firefox module; moreover, bugs declared and first patched by members of the periphery and bug rather solved in "I" mode tend to receive more votes; meanwhile, more votes are associated with an increased involvement of core members of the community in the provision of patches, quite possibly as a consequence of the increased efforts and attention that the highly voted bugs attract from the core.

Keywords: open-source communities; Firefox; bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-05-30
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00549769v1
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Published in 6th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems,(OSS), May 2010, Notre Dame, United States. pp.73-84, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-13244-5_6⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00549769

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-13244-5_6

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