Culture and Breaking Change: A Survey of Values and Practices in 18 Open Source Software Ecosystems

Software ecosystems have become one of the most important ways to organize software development, and to maintain and reuse code packages. But coordination can be a major challenge in software ecosystems when packages change, since packages tend to be highly interdependent yet independently maintained. The culture of an ecosystem includes those values and practices associated with managing change. We conducted a survey of thousands of developers in more than a dozen ecosystems, asking them about the values and practices that make up their communities' distinctive cultures; as well as the perceived power of different stakeholders and perceived health of the community. This dataset release shares anonymized data from the survey.