  The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)
projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we
report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core
contributors of popular GitHub projects. We reveal their motivations to assume
a key role in FLOSS projects (e.g., improving the projects because they are
also using it), the project characteristics that most helped in their
engagement process (e.g., a friendly community), and the barriers faced by the
surveyed core developers (e.g., lack of time of the project leaders). We also
compare our results with related studies about others kinds of open source
contributors (casual, one-time, and newcomers).
