The researchers focused exclusively on developers in the R language ecosystem, and as far as I can tell they scope the claims in their paper to only the R ecosystem. For whatever reason, the headline and lede instead emphasize a piece of pure speculation toward the end of the paper (generalizing to other open source communities) rather than the actual substance of the paper (exclusivley focused on the R ecosystem, and not even claiming that their results fully generalize even to all R developers, let alone all OSS developers).<p>Here&#x27;s why I think this work doesn&#x27;t generalize: Academics and people who don&#x27;t primarily identify as software engineers are over-represented in the R community, when compared against other open source projects. I think the set of answers you&#x27;d get from e.g., the developers of more traditional types of open source projects (editors, compilers, databases, games, OSes, frameworks&#x2F;libraries, etc.) are fundamentally different.<p>While I&#x27;m on my soap box, the other mistake that researchers who study open source developers often make is focusing on <i>very successful</i> open source projects, and then implicitly or explicitly generalizing those results to the huge hoard of open source developers. (Implicit generalization goes something like this: Intro: there are so many open source developers -- understanding their motivation is important! -- Actual study: let&#x27;s look at the motivation of contributors to the top 1% of projects -- Conclusion: we think these results generalize to other projects. Note that the authors of this study avoid this pattern, but the journalist doesn&#x27;t.) But of course, the motivations of the vast majority of OSS developers are going to be fundamentally different from those developers who have built extremely successful and high-profile systems.<p>Overall, I think this is a really nice and interesting paper about the R ecosystem. I just wish the journalist had chosen a different headline and lede.