Abstract
The role of firms in commercial Open Source projects (e.g., former MySQL, EnterpriseDB, SugarCRM) is a consolidated and generally accepted fact. On other hand, community Open Source projects, which are built upon communities and not directly associated with firms, are commonly perceived to be based mainly on the work of volunteers. Up to now, firms’ role in these projects has been poorly investigated. We conducted a survey on 1,302 SourceForge.net projects to inquire about the level and the typology of involvement of firms. We propose three different models for firm participation and provide empirical evidence on their diffusion in SourceForge.net.
Chapter PDF
References
Bonaccorsi, A., Rossi, C.: Comparing Motivations of Individual Programmers and Firms to Take Part in the Open Source Movement: From Community to Business, Knowledge. Technology and Policy 18(4), 40–64 (2006)
Capiluppi, A., Michlmayr, M.: From the Cathedral to the Bazaar: an empirical study of the lifecycle of volunteer community projects. In: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation, pp. 31–44. Springer, Boston (2007)
Capra, E., Wasserman, A.I.: A framework for evaluating managerial styles in Open Source projects. In: Proceedings of Open Source Systems Conference, pp. 1–14 (2008)
Capra, E.: Software design quality and development effort: an empirical study on the role of governance in Open Source projects, Ph.D. Dissertation, Dept. of Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano, Italy (2008)
Dahlander, L., Wallin, M.W.: A man on the inside: unlocking communities as complementary assets. Research Policy 35(8), 1243–1259 (2006)
Dahlander, L., Frederiksen, L., Rullani, F.: Online communities and open innovation: governance and symbolic value creation. Industry and Innovation 15(2), 115–123 (2007)
Dahlander, L., Magnusson, M.: How do firms make use of Open Source communities? Long Range Planning 41, 629–649 (2008)
De Laat, P.B.: Governance of open source software: state of the art. Journal of Management and Governance 11(2), 165–177 (2007)
Fitzgerald, B.: The transformation of Open Source software. MIS Quarterly 30(2), 587–598 (2006)
Fogel, K.: Producing Open Source software. O’Reilly, Sebastopol (2006)
Goldman, R., Gabriel, R.P.: Innovation happens elsewhere: Open Source as business strategy. Morgan Kauffmann, San Francisco (2005)
Goth, G.: Open Source business models: ready for prime time. IEEE Software 22(3), 99–100 (2005)
Hars, A.: Working for Free? Motivations for Participating in Open-Source Projects. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 6(3), 25–39 (2002)
Hawkins, R.E.: The economics of open source software for a competitive Firm. Why give it away for free? Netnomics 6(2), 103–117 (2004)
Henkel, J.: Selective revealing in open innovation processes: The case of embedded Linux. Research Policy 35, 953–969 (2006)
Hertel, G., Niedner, S., Herrmann, S.: Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel. Research Policy 32(7), 1159–1177 (2003)
Howison, J., Crowston, K.: The perils and pitfalls of mining SourceForge. In: Proceedings of International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, pp. 7–12 (2004)
Krishnamurthy, S.: A managerial overview of Open Source software. Business Horizons 46(5), 47–56 (2003)
Krishnamurthy, S.: Cave or Community?: An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects. First Monday (2002), http://ssrn.com/abstract=667402
Lerner, J., Tirole, J.: The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond. Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(2), 99–120 (2005)
Raymond, E.: The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Riehle, D.: The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives. IEEE Computer 40(4), 25–32 (2007)
Roberts, J.A., Hann, I.H., Slaughter, S.A.: Understanding the Motivations, Participation, and Performance of Open Source Software Developers: A Longitudinal Study of the Apache Projects. Management Science 52(7), 984 (2006)
The Asterisk Project, http://www.asterisk.org/about
The Jikes Project, http://jikes.sourceforge.net
The MONO Project, http://mono-project.com/main_page
The Open Source Initiative, http://www.opensource.org
Stallman, R.M.: The GNU manifesto. Oxford University Press, NY (1990)
Tille, A.: Custom Debian distributions (January 25, 2007), http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/paper-cdd/debian-cdd.en.pdf
The Ximian Group, http://www.novell.com/linux/ximian.html
Wasserman, A.I., Capra, E.: Evaluating software engineering processes in commercial and community Open Source projects. In: Proc. Int’l. Workshop Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development (2007)
West, J., O’Mahony, S.: Contrasting Community Building in Sponsored and Community Founded Open Source Projects. In: Proceedings of 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Capra, E., Francalanci, C., Merlo, F., Rossi Lamastra, C. (2009). A Survey on Firms’ Participation in Open Source Community Projects. In: Boldyreff, C., Crowston, K., Lundell, B., Wasserman, A.I. (eds) Open Source Ecosystems: Diverse Communities Interacting. OSS 2009. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 299. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02032-2_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02032-2_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02031-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02032-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)