Healthy Community and Healthy Commons: ‘Opensourcing’ as a Sustainable Model of Software Production

Abstract

Many commercial software firms rely on opensourcing as a viable model of software production. Opensourcing is a specific form of interaction between firms and open source software (OSS) communities for collaboratively producing software. The existing literature has identified opensourcing as a viable form of software production, which could be a substitute for “in-house” or “outsourced” software development. However, little is known about how opensourcing works or is sustained in the long term. The objective of this research is to explain the factors affecting the sustainability of opensourcing as a model of software production. The study employs a single case study of hospital software in Thailand to understand how firms and the communities can live symbiotically and sustain their collaboration to peer-produce vertical domain software. The analysis reveals six mechanisms (positive experience, trust in the leadership of the project leader, the demonstration of reciprocity, marketing the community, enriching knowledge, and face-to-face meetings) and demonstrates how they operate in conjunction with each other to sustain opensourcing.

Open Source Community Health: Analytical Metrics and Their Corresponding Narratives

“…Table I illustrates the wide variety of measures used to operationalize open source project health using activity metrics or large scale summaries. Much of the early literature on open source project health focused on success measures [59], [60], [11], [61], [62], [63], however as open source health research has matured, the focus has moved to measures of sustainability [64], [51], [65], [52], [66], [67], [68], [58] and further, to an understanding that open source health must include considerations for social interactions and project diversity when estimating survivability [69], [7], [70], [34], [9], [71], [72]. Sustainability and survivability are difficult to estimate based on the current or historical level of activity alone, especially in an era where corporate engagement is a rapidly increasing aspect of open source ecosystems across the globe [2].…”

“…Each approach aims to make representations of open source project health efficient through the collection, aggregation and analysis of trace data from repositories, issue trackers, and other traces of work and communication [6]. This study adopts the general view that open source project health is a project's ability to continue to produce quality software [7], [8]. Trace data is a building blocks for nearly all measures of open source project health [9], [10], [11], making the collection and analysis of data related to the construction of open source at once essential for representing open source project health, and also at present, incommensurate with the challenge [12], [13].…”

Improving the detection of community smells through socio‐technical and sentiment analysis

“…Various works focused recently on OSS community health in software engineering 8,9,41,64,65 . Andrade and Saraiva 66 proposed a model structure, functions, and instructions to evaluate OSS communities.…”

“…Jansen 41 introduced a measurement methodology of the health of OSS ecosystems based on the concept of health operationalization. Later, Naparat et al 64 studied the factors that affect the sustainability of opensourcing as a model of software production. The study reveals various mechanisms (e.g., positive experience, trust, marketing the community, and face‐to‐face meetings) and investigated how they operate in conjunction with each other to sustain opensourcing.…”

Selecting an open innovation community as an alliance partner: Looking for healthy communities and ecosystems

“…Besides open source literature focused on software evaluation, we have not found any literature that focuses on choosing which community has a good potential to serve as a corporate innovation partner - unpack what happens once the relationship has already been established (Dahlander and Magnusson 2005;Germonprez et al 2017;Naparat et al 2015). There is a significant body of literature focused on factors that enable sustainability of open source communities and ecosystems (Crowston et al 2006;Jansen 2014), but this literature is typically not concerned with corporate engagement and takes an "inward" perspective.…”