L’identification des projets de logiciel libre accessibles aux nouveaux contributeurs
In EIAH2023 : 11ème conférence sur les environnements informatiques pour l’apprentissage humain
Abstract
FOSS makes an increasing amount of the public and industrial software landscape, notably for its transparency and democratic governance. However, simply publishing the source code of a software does not automatically make it accessible, and many barriers impede new contributors approaching these projects. Through a large-scale software mining of the Software Heritage archive, we test the pertinence of three signals in the identification of accessible FOSS projects for new contributors. Our results show a positive correlation between the number of new contributors of a project successfully bringing their contribution to completion and the presence of contributing guidelines, as well as between that same number and the number of recent unique contributors in the project. Such signals could find a use in the teaching of FOSS practices, helping teachers to select accessible projects for their students.