The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming: Implications for Addressing Complex Public Policy and Management Problems

Abstract

Recently, an exciting approach to solving complex problems has evolved out of computer science, called Open Source programming. In open source software development settings, programmers freely share their intellectual property ? their readable programming source code ? over the Internet. Some open source endeavors have resulted in very complex, high-quality software products, of which the best-known are the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server. A great advantage of an Internet-based open source approach is its potential to achieve global collective action toward developing robust solutions to complex programming problems. This paper argues that open source has potential application beyond computer programming. Open source principles could potentially be applied to almost any intellectual endeavor, and may be a very important innovation toward harnessing global collaboration toward solving complex public policy and management problems. Little research has been published outlining the details of how successful open source programming endeavors are achieved, such as how projects are initiated and organized over time, what rules for participation have been established, and how the methods for maintaining versions of new submissions have been managed. The institutional designs and management of open source projects could be critical for ensuring participants' willingness to collaborate and for recruiting new team members. This paper and the research program it describes, attempts to address this gap. It provides a summary of the "life cycle" of open source programming projects based on existing literature that is largely focused on high-profile open source projects like Linux and Apache Web Server. It then provides interim results from an on-going study of the institutional designs of open source programming projects. It concludes by presenting some examples of non-programming projects that are beginning to apply open source or licensing principles in areas outside of programming and by presenting an example of how these principles might be applied to complex problems beyond programming in the realm of environmental policy and management.

Transition of governance in a mature open software source community: Evidence from the Debian case

“…At that point it is important to reach programmers who think along with this new initiative. Motivation, "the kernel," and a modular design are three important components of this stage of an OSS project (Schweik and Semenov, 2003). Even if there is an increasing number of studies that have focused on the motivation of programmers to take part in OSS communities (Hertel et al, 2003), parallel.…”

“…For OSS communities, a critical growth stage is reached at the moment they are moving from the project initiation stage to the stage of "going open" (Rasters, 2004, Schweik andSemenov, 2003 (Ouchi, 1979). Organizational life cycle theorists have shown that the internal structure of organization is changing by going through different growth stages (introduction, growth, maturity or decline).…”

“…(Schweik and Semenov, 2003 had the function to experiment and to further improve on public releases as they were used as a learning device. To account for this experimental tree of development and to include new innovative opportunities, the Debian OSS community has developed later a whole cycle of releases ranging from an 'unstable' over a 'testing' to a 'stable' package.…”

Tragedy of the FOSS commons? Investigating the institutional designs of free/libre and open source software projects

“…Inexperienced volunteer programmers often participate in FOSS projects in order to build their own skills through the reading and writing of code and by being subjected to the peer-review process. Through this participation, they hope to show off their skills, make connections and build a reputation with, in part, the hope of gaining future economic opportunities (Feller and Fitzgerald, 2001;Schweik and Semenov, 2003;Lerner and Tirole, 2005).…”

“…In order to study FOSS institutions and their influence on the success or failure of projects, there are three important attributes that need to be considered: (1) Evolutionary (Schweik and Semenov, 2003;Schweik, 2005) we noted that FOSS projects go through two stages, Initiation and Growth. We define the Initiation Stage as the initial period of time a project goes through where people are collaborating on software code but there has yet to be a public release of this code.…”