For instance, on a minuscule open source project of mine, I wrote all the code and another developer has (kindly) stepped up and managed upgrades to one of the dependencies, bumping the version number when it's time to do so.

If he and I were employed together to work on this project, a workload distribution of me writing and maintaining the entire codebase (minus one line) and him coming by every couple months to update a version number would not be a very fair or realistic division of labor.

The open source development process is very different from anything else. None of my projects at work have a long tail of contributors submitting comment typo fixes.

It'd be much more fair if the project at your job started out as a proof-of-concept that you wrote, while the other dev worked on other things.

Once your proof-of-concept grew into something management wanted, you'd probably still be writing a lot of the code, and the other developer would be contributing, but in the realm of 20% of the codebase, at least to start (and according to this article, that wouldn't change).

You're right, and I don't doubt the value of studying open source projects or that it's the best that can be done given the data available, but there are limitations on how much light this data can shed on the great mass of code being written within organizations.

Maybe the results do apply to the situation you describe, I'd be curious to know that.

I'd say two things, the first is that if you're not paid, you don't have that much incentive to contribute hardly so it's no surprise that most OS projects are maintained by a handful of (great indeed) highly motivated developers. Second is that it's something widely known that developers are not flexible, so if they're in charge of their baby, they won't make so many efforts to encourage outsiders contributions. Whereas in a corp environment, managers and other devs should make sure it doesn't become an obstacle to contributions.

That's not very precise but I think people can relate to what I said.

I can't particularly relate, There are things that I am paid to do and there are things that I want to do...sometimes those two things overlap, sometimes they don't. Money is one way to maybe produce incentive..it's not guaranteed and it's not the only way.

I can say for sure that the quality of the things that I want to do will always have better quality on average than the things that I am paid to do.

I can certainly generalize that humans are not flexible, but I don't think that's limited to programmers.