Conventional viewpoint?!

«The conventional viewpoint among open-source projects is that drive-through contributors are problematic», seriously? Most free software projects I know tend to boast about how many contributors they have and consider as many people as possible in the count, thereby giving value to the casual contributors as well. The fact that most software projects have a small base of (real) contributors is usually used as (misguided) argument by the enemies of free software.

As for a SLA approach, that's an important step to take, however it comes with issues: 1) it requires someone to be "forced" to do the work mandated by the policy, which usually means you must have employees working on it; 2) CVS and issue tracker software (let alone mailing lists) may be unable to answer the question "is there a question/report/patch which is still unattended after X days?" (for instance bugzilla is able to tell you such a thing, but less mature issue trackers aren't: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T76825 ).

The classification of the 4 main kinds of drive-through contributions was interesting, but also likely to be based on a small sample of projects. Can someone point to some research on the matter? I can find some research on Sourceforge or FLOSSmetric datasets (mostly ancient), something on the Eclipse and Mozilla bugzillas and something on i18n for a few hundreds projects, but little systematic and wide-ranging research on recent evolutions. Maybe http://doai.io/10.4018/ijossp.2012100101 , http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd4996 , http://hdl.handle.net/10612/1796 are interesting but skimming didn't point to anything specific.