How Successful Are Open Source Contributions From Countries with Different Levels of Human Development?

TL;DR

This study investigates how developers' country of origin, especially those from low HDI countries, influences the success rate of their open source contributions, revealing disparities in acceptance and rejection rates.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking developers' geographic location and human development level to pull request outcomes in open source projects.

Findings

Developers from low HDI countries submit fewer pull requests.

They face higher rejection rates compared to high HDI countries.

Geographic and development level disparities affect open source contribution success.

Abstract

Are Brazilian developers less likely to have a contribution accepted than their peers from, say, the United Kingdom? In this paper we studied whether the developers' location relates to the outcome of a pull request. We curated the locations of 14k contributors who performed 44k pull requests to 20 open source projects. Our results indeed suggest that developers from countries with low human development indexes (HDI) not only perform a small fraction of the overall pull requests, but they also are the ones that face rejection the most.