A Longitudinal Study on the Maintainers' Sentiment of a Large Scale Open Source Ecosystem

Abstract

Software development is a collaborative activity in which feelings and emotions can affect the developer's productivity, creativity, and contribution satisfaction. For example, the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which is used by subsystem maintainers to review patches sent by contributors, is known for its direct communication style, which is sometimes blamed as having a negative impact on contributors. In September 28, 2018, the kernel's lead maintainer, Linus Torvalds, announced that he would take a temporary break from the community, which led numerous members of the kernel community and observers from other communities to wonder to what extent this unexpected event could raise awareness about respectful interactions between community members. This paper performs an exploratory study in which we use an off-the-shelf sentiment mining tool to assess whether the maintainers' sentiment changed after Linus Torvalds' temporary break from his maintainer role. Based on the data available thus far, we did not find any high-level changes in maintainer sentiment. In future work, we will perform more fine-grained sentiment analysis.