Economic Organization and Viability of Open Source Software

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Open source software relies on the expertise of developers around the world, who volunteer to produce software collaboratively. Their mode of collaboration requires participants to share the results of their work freely with others. By revealing the source code of the programs on which they work, developers participating in these collaborations are able to design new features, fix bugs in programs, and tailor the software to suit their own needs. The attractiveness of engaging in this method of producing software in the Internet environment has led to the emergence and growth of specialized, online virtual communities whose members follow rather clearly established procedures in performing their professional tasks, but are otherwise bound together by loose rules of association. This project inquires into the sustainability of such organizations, and the likely extent of their domain of viability-in terms of the kinds of goods and services that might reliably be supplied in this way. The investigation has three more proximate empirical objectives. The first is to identify typical patterns in the evolution of these communities' informal organizational structures and their norms of conduct. The development of procedural authority, and other means of resolving conflicts among individuals in regard to the substance of their work, and of verifying and validating their contributions, are subjects for special study. The second objective is to characterize the distribution of effort input within these communities and its relationship to the structure and distribution of internal "rewards," and derived external benefits for different levels of participation. These tasks will be approached through analysis of passively collected data, participant responses to email survey questionnaires, and in-depth case histories of particular communities. A third and larger goal is to understand the dynamics of these "virtual communities" and the similarities and differences they exhibit in comparisons with collaborative organizations involving spatially distributed academic ("open science") researchers whose work is enabled by computer-mediated telecommunications