A influência dos patrocinadores nas estruturas organizacionais de comunidades de software livre

Abstract

Free source communities, categorized as virtual organizations, stand out for collaborative production dispersed geographically, transforming it into valuable goods recognized by society. Initially identified with self-management values, these communities aroused the interest of public and private organizations inserted in this context as sponsors. The impact of these new stakeholders in the organizational structure of the free software community has been studied in the literature. In this study, we use the literature of Organizational Structure, Sponsorship and Free Software. Three case studies of free software communities were conducted, covering cases involving government sponsorship, cooperative society and community not sponsored in order to contrast them. First, we made a documentary research on the forums and sites of communities and only after then semistructured interviews were conducted with community members. The results showed that the sponsors take the most important decisions after consulting the community, communities had a division of labor into papers and the formalization of standards in sponsored communities was identified as a strategy to facilitate interaction with participants and other organizations. Therefore, the research showed the influence of sponsors on the free software community structures, informing managers of free software communities about the relevance of sponsorship for the maintenance and development of the community.