Authors: Brigitta Németh & Johannes Wachs

Firm involvement in Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems has increased markedly in recent years. Projects, frameworks, and even entire programming languages receive significant developmental and financial support from firms. Yet we know remarkably little about how this involvement shapes the behavior of the larger community of contributors in OSS. Here we study the involvement of the Mozilla Corporation in the Rust programming language ecosystem. Mozilla incubated Rust and employed a significant number of the language’s core developers up until summer 2020, when a strategic reorganization led to a significant downsizing of these developers. We use this shock to study the influence of centralized sponsorship and its withdrawal on contributors. To do so, we use a nearly complete history of contributions to all OSS Rust projects, covering over 30,000 developers working on nearly 40,000 projects from 2015 to 2022. Event study models suggest that the shock had a significant negative impact on the
previously growing trend of activity (an immediate 9.4% decrease in weekly commits, and a 0.4% decrease in the trend of commits per week). We observe an interesting asymmetry: fewer new users joined and fewer new projects were started, but there was no significant increase in project abandonment or users leaving the ecosystem. At the user level, we observe heterogeneous effects. Activity by Mozilla developers decreased by half, though recovered significantly within months. Declines in contributions by non-core contributors were more
persistent. Overall, we find while withdrawal of centralized support discouraged new contributors and the launch of new projects in the Rust ecosystem, developers embedded in the ecosystem continued to contribute.

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