Why Open Source software can succeed

Abstract

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First, the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an environment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper shows that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.

Exploring the Role of Outside Organizations in Free / Open Source Software Projects

“…According to Bonaccorsi and Rossi, individuals and firms have different motivations for participating in FOSS projects [3]. Firms' motivations for contributing centered on the economic and technological, while individuals were driven by social and personal reasons.…”

“…In general FOSS projects are seen as meritocracies, where an individual contributors' worth and influence is based upon the quantity and quality of their past contributions to the community. Because of this, despite the fact that FOSS participation is driven by altruism and collaboration [3], there is inherent tension and competition within projects. "Because Apache is a meritocracy, even though all mailing list subscribers can express an opinion by voting, their action may be ignored unless they are recognized as serious contributors" [14].…”

Core-periphery communication and the success of free/libre open source software projects

“…The health of the developer community is critical for the performance of projects [2], but it is challenging to sustain a project with voluntary members over the long term [3,4]. Social-relational issues have been seen as a key component of achieving project effectiveness [5] and enhancing online group involvement and collaboration [6].…”

Digging into the Eclipse Marketplace

“…As a result, many companies use such systems as basis for their own products [6], wherefore commercial and open-source software are more and more used concurrently [1,2,10,17]. A good example for this co-existence is the de facto standard Eclipse 1 [6,7,19].…”