Trends and behavior of developers in open collaborative software projects

We conduct an extensive analysis on the developers of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Our goal is to discover trends that govern the developers' behavior in contributing to OSS projects. To achieve our goal, we define and analyze a set of developer and OSS project features. Moreover, we study the behavior of the developers on selecting OSS projects to participate in by analyzing the project features that dictate the developers' selection. In addition, we study the difference between developers who seek a job and who do not seek a job in developing social ties. We, also, analyze the developers' affiliation (e.g., corporate, university, Institute, etc.) and location (e.g., city) statistics. It is found that a significant ratio of developers share the same affiliation and location in a team for a project that is being developed by remote collaborators. We use a dataset collected from Github.com, which is one of the most fast-growing and large-scale online OSS community. This study is substantial for future works of recommender systems targeting the OSS community.