How Ecosystem Cultures Differ: Results from a Survey on Values and Practices across 18 Software Ecosystems

Do npm-inspired ecosystems share npm's community values? What tools have been adopted in the Perl, Ruby, and Erlang communities? Do industry-backed communities generally strive toward stability rather than innovation? Do ecosystems generally share a set of values and are those values different among ecosystems? Based on our recent interviews on breaking APIs, we conducted a survey about values and practices among over 2000 developers in 18 ecosystems to shed some light on these questions. We asked about practices for dealing with breaking changes to packages in their ecosystem, as well as the values that they think the practices are attempting to further.