Participation Inequality and the 90-9-1 Principle in Open Source

Participation inequality is a major challenge in any shared-resource system. This is known as the volunteer's dilemma: everybody wants to benefit from a resource without contributing, expecting others will do the work. This paper explores whether this problem also arises in open source development. In particular, we analyze the behaviour of GitHub users to assess whether the 90-9-1 principle applies to open source. We study it both from a...