Contributing Back to the Ecosystem: A User Survey of NPM Developers

TL;DR

This paper surveys NPM developers to understand their contribution behaviors and sustainability concerns, revealing a tendency to maintain their own packages over contributing to the broader ecosystem.

Contribution

It provides new insights into developer motivations and behaviors regarding ecosystem contributions, highlighting areas for tool support and sustainability research.

Findings

Developers prefer maintaining their own packages over contributing to others.

Sustainability issues in ecosystems can have widespread network effects.

Survey data is publicly available for further research.

Abstract

With the rise of the library ecosystem (such as NPM for JavaScript and PyPI for Python), a developer has access to a multitude of library packages that they can adopt as dependencies into their application.Prior work has found that these ecosystems form a complex web of dependencies, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Due to the Open Source Software (OSS) nature of third party libraries, there are rising concerns with the sustainability of these libraries. In a survey of 49 developers from the NPM ecosystem, we find that developers are more likely to maintain their own packages rather than contribute to the ecosystem. Our results opens up new avenues into tool support and research into how to sustain these ecosystems, especially for developers that depend on these libraries. We have made available the raw results of the survey at \url{https://tinyurl.com/2p8sdmr3}.