The census of the Brazilian open-source community

Abstract

During a long time, software engineering research has been trying to better understand open-source communities and uncover two fundamental questions: (i) who are the contributors and (i) why they contribute. Most of these researches focus on well-known OSS projects, but little is known about the OSS movement in emerging countries. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by presenting a picture of the Brazilian open-source contributor. To achieve this goal, we examined activities from more than 12,400 programmers on Github, during the period of a year. Subsequently, we correlate our findings with a survey that was answered by more than 1,000 active contributors. Our results show that exists an OSS trend in Brazil: most part of the contributors are active, performing around 30 contributions per year, and they contribute to OSS basically by altruism.