The Introduction of README and CONTRIBUTING Files in Open Source Software Development

TL;DR

This study analyzes the early adoption and content of README and CONTRIBUTING files in open source projects, revealing a focus on technical instructions over community engagement.

Contribution

It provides a novel quantitative analysis of README and CONTRIBUTING files in FLOSS projects, highlighting their typical content and timing of introduction.

Findings

Projects create minimal README files proactively.

CONTRIBUTING files are often added after initial contributions.

Initial files mainly describe project usage and contribution procedures.

Abstract

README and CONTRIBUTING files can serve as the first point of contact for potential contributors to free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects. Prominent open source software organizations such as Mozilla, GitHub, and the Linux Foundation advocate that projects provide community-focused and process-oriented documentation early to foster recruitment and activity. In this paper we investigate the introduction of these documents in FLOSS projects, including whether early documentation conforms to these recommendations or explains subsequent activity. We use a novel dataset of FLOSS projects packaged by the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and conduct a quantitative analysis to examine README (n=4226) and CONTRIBUTING (n=714) files when they are first published into projects' repositories. We find that projects create minimal READMEs proactively, but often publish CONTRIBUTING files following an influx of contributions. The initial versions of these files rarely focus on community development, instead containing descriptions of project procedure for library usage or code contribution. The findings suggest that FLOSS projects do not create documentation with community-building in mind, but rather favor brevity and standardized instructions.