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How Developers Acquire FLOSS Skills

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Abstract

With the increasing prominence of open collaboration as found in free/libre/open source software projects and other joint production communities, potential participants need to acquire skills. How these skills are learned has received little research attention. This article presents a large-scale survey (5,309 valid responses) in which users and developers of the beta release of a popular file download application were asked which learning styles were used to acquire technical and social skills. We find that the extent to which a person acquired the relevant skills through informal methods tends to be higher if the person is a free/libre/open source code contributor, while being a professional software developer does not have this effect. Additionally, younger participants proved more likely to make use of formal methods of learning. These insights will help individuals, commercial companies, educational institutions, governments and open collaborative projects decide how they promote learning.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Ann Barcomb, Michael Grottke, Jan-Philipp Stauffert, Dirk Riehle & Sabrina Jahn

Authors
  1. Ann Barcomb

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  2. Michael Grottke

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  3. Jan-Philipp Stauffert

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  4. Dirk Riehle

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  5. Sabrina Jahn

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Corresponding author

Correspondence toDirk Riehle.

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Università degli Studi di Milano, Crema, Italy

    Ernesto Damiani

  2. Computer Science Department, Università degli Studi di Milano, Crema, Italy

    Fulvio Frati

  3. Department Informatik, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Dirk Riehle

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Moffett Field, California, USA

    Anthony I. Wasserman

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© 2015 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

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Barcomb, A., Grottke, M., Stauffert, JP., Riehle, D., Jahn, S. (2015). How Developers Acquire FLOSS Skills. In: Damiani, E., Frati, F., Riehle, D., Wasserman, A. (eds) Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact. OSS 2015. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_3

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