Contributions, Collaborations, and Transitions: Paid and Volunteer Developers in the Rust Community

An increasing number of companies are contributing to open source software (OSS) projects by assigning their employees to advance their business objectives. These paid developers collaborate with volunteer contributors, but the differing motivations of these two groups can sometimes lead to conflicts, which might endanger the OSS project’s sustainability. This article presents a multi-method comparative study of paid developers and volunteers in Rust, currently one of the most popular open source programming languages. We compare volunteers and paid developers through contribution behavior, social collaboration, and long-term participation. Then, we solicit volunteers’ perceptions of paid developers and explore the emotions caused when volunteers transition to paid roles. We find that core paid developers tend to contribute more frequently; peripheral paid developers contribute bigger commits and focus more on implementing features; both core and peripheral paid developers collaborate more with volunteers but less intensively than expected; and being paid correlates positively with becoming a long-term contributor. Our study also reveals existing unfamiliarity and prejudices among volunteers towards paid developers, and that volunteer-to-paid transitions can evoke negative community sentiments. This study suggests that the dichotomous view of paid vs. volunteer developers is too simplistic and that further subgroups could be identified. Contributing organizations should become more sensitive to how OSS communities perceive them when they attempt to get involved and make improvements.