Um Estudo Exploratório Sobre Contribuições Casuais em Projetos de Software Livre: Caso do Projeto LibreOffice

Many free software communities leverage contributions from volunteers and need to attract, motivate and engage new developers. A phenomenon that has attracted attention are the casual contributions made by developers who are not interested in becoming members of the projects. The goal of this paper is to conduct an exploratory study of the interaction of newcomers to LibreOffice project to understand the phenomenon of casual contributions. To achieve this, we analyzed historical data from mailing lists, issue tracker and code review management tool. The results showed that 27.1% of the 2013 newcomers were classified as casual contributors and the effort by the community to support them is relatively low.