Open Source Ecosystems Diverse Communities Interacting

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.

Computer software and technologies are advancing at an amazing rate. The accessibility of these software sources allows for a wider power among common users as well as rapid advancement in program development and operating information. Free and Open Source Software in Modern Data Science and Business Intelligence: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly resource that examines the differences between the two types of software, integral in the FOSS movement, and their effect on the distribution and use of software. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics, such as FOSS Ecology, graph mining, and project tasks, this book is geared towards academicians, researchers, and students interested in current research on the growing importance of FOSS and its expanding reach in IT infrastructure.

Fifteen years ago software was primarily developed either within an organizational field of voluntary open source software communities or within an organizational field of commercial companies. Within the organizational field of open source software, participants looked upon themselves as programmers and users modifying and sharing codes, making them available to everyone for free. Within the field of commercial companies, managers and employees perceived software as a commodity that could be bought and sold, and the development of the software was wrapped in copyrights and licenses. Today, commercial companies are involved in activities within open source software communities in many different ways. How did people start to co-operate with the enemy on software development is the leading question in the book. The answers are based on in-depth studies of three empirical cases showing different variations of successful co-operation. In all three cases the development has raised serious identity questions like: Who am I? Who are my friends and enemies? And what is the right thing for me to do in the future? The book is for everyone interested in software development and/or open innovation processes and will be of particular interest for organizational scholars as it draws heavily on sociological concepts like institutional logics, institutional work and institutional actors.

This thesis approaches the phenomenon of open source software (OSS) from a managerial and organisational point of view. In a slightly narrower sense, this thesis studies commercialisation aspects around community-driven open source. The term ‘community-driven’ signifies open source projects that are managed, steered, and controlled by communities of volunteers, as opposed to those that are managed, steered, and controlled by single corporate sponsors. By adopting a business ecology perspective, this thesis places emphasis on the larger context within which the commercialisation of OSS is embedded (e.g., global and collaborative production regimes, ideological foundations, market characteristics, and diffuse boundary conditions). Because many business benefits arise as a consequence of the activities taking place in the communities and ecosystems around open source projects, a business ecology perspective may be a useful analytical guide for understanding the opportunities, challenges, and risks that firms face in commercializing OSS. There are two overarching themes guiding this thesis. The first theme concerns the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. There is a tendency in the literature on business ecosystems and open source to emphasise the benefits, opportunities, and positive aspects of behaviour, at the expense of the challenges that firms face. However, business ecosystems are not only spaces of opportunity, they may also pose a variety of challenges that firms need to overcome in order to be successful. To help rectify this imbalance in the literature, the first theme particularly focuses on the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. The underlying ambition is to facilitate a more balanced and holistic understanding of the collaborative and competitive dynamics in ecosystems around open source projects. The other theme concerns the complex intertwining of community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. As is acknowledged in the literature, the subject of firm-community interaction has become increasingly important because the survival, success, and sustainability of peer production communities has become of strategic relevance to many organisations. However, while many strategic benefits may arise as a consequence of firm-community interaction, there is a lack of research studying how the value-creating logics of firm–community interaction are embedded within the bigger picture in which they occur. Bearing this bigger picture in mind, this thesis explores the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing by focusing on four aspects that are theorised in the literature: reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity. This thesis is designed as a qualitative exploratory single-case study. The empirical case is Joomla, a popular open source content management system. In a nutshell, the Joomla case in this thesis comprises the interactions in the Joomla community and the commercial activities around the Joomla platform (e.g., web development, consulting, marketing, customisation, extensions). In order to achieve greater analytical depth, the business ecology perspective is complemented with ideas and propositions from other theoretical areas, such as stakeholder theory, community governance, organizational identity, motivation theory, pricing, and bundling. The findings show that the common challenges in commercialising community-driven open source revolve around nine distinct factors that roughly cluster into three domains: the ecosystem, the community, and the firm. In short, the domain of the ecosystem comprises the global operating environment, the pace of change, and the cannibalisation of ideas. The domain of the community comprises the platform policy, platform image, and the voluntary nature of the open source project. And finally, the domain of the firm comprises the blurring boundaries between private and professional lives, the difficulty of estimating costs, and firm dependencies. Based on these insights, a framework for analysing community-based value creation in business ecosystems is proposed. This framework integrates collective innovation, community engagement, and value capture into a unified model of value creation in contexts of firm–community interaction. Furthermore, the findings reveal demonstrable effects of reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity in the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. By showing that this intertwining can be strong in empirical cases where commercial activities are often implicitly assumed to be absent, this thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of firm involvement in the realm of open source. Based on the empirical and analytical insights, a number of further theoretical implications are discussed, such as the role of intersubjective trust in relation to the uncertainties that commercial actors face, an alternative way of classifying community types, the metaphor of superorganisms in the context of open source, issues pertaining to the well-being of community participants, and issues in relation to the transitioning of open source developers from a community-based to an entrepreneurial self-identity when commercialising an open source solution. Furthermore, this thesis builds on six sub-studies that make individual contributions of their own. In a broad sense, this thesis contributes to the literature streams on the commercialisation of OSS, the business value and strategic aspects of open source, the interrelationships between community forms of organising and entrepreneurial activities, and the nascent research on ecology perspectives on peer-production communities. A variety of opportunities for future research are highlighted. Denna avhandling undersöker fenomenet öppen källkod, ’open source’, ur ett lednings och styrningsperspektiv. Mer konkret studeras aspekter på kommersialisering av ett community-drivet open source projekt (OSS, open source software). Uttrycket ’community-drivet’ hänvisar till open source projekt som drivs och styrs av volontärgrupper, till skillnad från open source projekt som drivs och styrs av enskilda företag. Genom att tillämpa ett affärsekologiperspektiv fokuserar denna avhandling på det vidare sammanhang som karaktäriserar kommersialisering av OSS, såsom globala och kollaborativa produktionssystem, värderingarna öppenhet och samarbete, marknadsstrukturer, och diffusa organisationsgränser. Aktiviteterna i open source communityn och dess kringliggande ekosystem kan bidra till många fördelar för företag, och därför kan ett affärsekologiperspektiv vara en användbar analytisk lins för att förstå de möjligheter, utmaningar och risker som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar OSS. Två övergripande teman lyfts fram i denna avhandling. Det första temat handlar om de utmaningar som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar community-driven OSS. Det finns i litteraturen om affärsekologier och open source en tendens att betona fördelar, möjligheter och positiva aspekter på beteende på bekostnad av att undersöka utmaningar som företag står inför. Affärsekologier innebär dock inte enbart möjligheter för företag, utan kan också orsaka en rad utmaningar som företag behöver hantera för att lyckas. Med utgångspunkt i denna obalans i litteraturen fokuserar det första temat på de utmaningar med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS. Detta görs för att bidra till en mer balanserad och holistisk förståelse av den på samma gång kollaborativa och konkurrerande dynamiken i affärsekologin runt ett open source projekt. Det andra temat handlar om sammanflätningen (intertwining) mellan community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet. Såsom det framgår i litteraturen har frågan om samverkan mellan företag och communities blivit allt viktigare, eftersom communityernas överlevnad, framgång och hållbarhet har blivit strategiskt viktiga för många organisationer. Även om många strategiska fördelar kan uppstå som en följd av samverkan mellan företag och communities saknas forskning om hur värdeskapande uppstår i en vidare kontext. Med ett bredare perspektiv i åtanke undersöker denna avhandling sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och en vinstdrivande verksamhet genom att fokusera på fyra aspekter av sammanflätning som förekommer i litteraturen: förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Denna avhandling är utformad som en kvalitativ utforskande fallstudie. Det empiriska fallet är Joomla, ett innehållshanteringssystem som bygger på open source. Inom ramen för avhandlingen undersöks fallet i termer av samspel inom Joomla-communityn och de kommersiella aktiviteterna som sker runt Joomla-plattformen (t.ex., webbutveckling, rådgivning, marknadsföring, anpassningar, och extensions). För att uppnå ett analytiskt djup kompletteras affärsekologiperspektivet med idéer och förslag från andra teoretiska områden, såsom intressentmodellen, community-styrning, företagsidentitet, motivationsteori, prissättning, och buntning. Resultaten visar att utmaningarna med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS kretsar kring nio olika faktorer som kan grupperas i tre områden: ekosystemet, communityn, och företaget. Ekosystemsfaktorerna innefattar den globala verksamma miljön, förändringshastigheten och kannibalisering av idéer. Community-faktorerna innefattar plattformspolicy, plattformsimage, och att deltagandet i open source projektet sker på frivillig basis. Slutligen innefattar företagsfaktorerna suddiga gränser mellan privatliv och arbetsliv, svårigheten att uppskatta kostnader samt beroendeförhållanden mellan företag. Baserat på dessa insikter föreslås en modell för att analysera communitybaserad värdeskapande i affärsekologier. Modellen integrerar kollektiv innovation, community-deltagande, och value capture i en holistisk modell för community-baserad värdeskapande i kontexten samverkan mellan företag och communities. Vidare beskrivs effekterna av sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet i termer av förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Genom att visa att sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet kan vara stark i fall där det ofta antas implicit att kommersiella aktiviteter inte förekommer ger denna avhandling en mer nyanserad förståelse av företags roll i kontexten open source. Baserat på empiriska och analytiska insikter diskuterar denna avhandling ett antal teoretiska konsekvenser, såsom rollen som intersubjektiv tillit spelar i förhållande till den ovisshet som kommersiella aktörer står inför, ett alternativt sätt att klassificera community-typer, metaforen superorganismer i kontexten open source, community-deltagares välbefinnande, samt hur open source utvecklare hanterar övergången från en community-baserad självidentitet till en entreprenöriell självidentitet vid kommersialisering av OSS. Dessutom ger de sex delstudier som avhandlingen bygger på egna bidrag som presenteras i respektive delstudie. I stora drag bidrar denna avhandling till litteraturen om kommersialisering av OSS, affärsmässiga och strategiska aspekter på open source, samspelet mellan community-driven entreprenörsverksamhet samt den framväxande forskning som använder ett affärsekologiperspektiv för att studera kollegial produktion baserad på allmännytta. En mängd olika möjligheter för framtida forskning lyfts fram.

The innovative process of open source software is led in greater part by the end-users; therefore this aspect of open source software remains significant beyond the realm of traditional software development. Open Source Software Dynamics, Processes, and Applications is a multidisciplinary collection of research and approaches on the applications and processes of open source software. Highlighting the development processes performed by software programmers, the motivations of its participants, and the legal and economic issues that have been raised; this book is essential for scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of software engineering and management as well as sociology.

The quick growth of computer technology and development of software caused it to be in a constant state of change and advancement. This advancement in software development meant that there would be many types of software developed in order to excel in usability and efficiency. Among these different types of software was open source software, one that grants permission for users to use, study, change, and distribute it freely. Due to its availability, open source software has quickly become a valuable asset to the world of computer technology and across various disciplines including education, business, and library science. The Research Anthology on Usage and Development of Open Source Software presents comprehensive research on the design and development of open source software as well as the ways in which it is used. The text discusses in depth the way in which this computer software has been made into a collaborative effort for the advancement of software technology. Discussing topics such as ISO standards, big data, fault prediction, open collaboration, and software development, this anthology is essential for computer engineers, software developers, IT specialists and consultants, instructors, librarians, managers, executives, professionals, academicians, researchers, and students.

The pervasiveness of and universal access to modern Information and Communication Technologies has enabled a popular new paradigm in the dissemination of information, art, and ideas. Now, instead of relying on a finite number of content providers to control the flow of information, users can generate and disseminate their own content for a wider audience. Open Source Technology: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications investigates examples and methodologies in user-generated and freely-accessible content available through electronic and online media. With applications in education, government, entertainment, and more, the technologies explored in these volumes will provide a comprehensive reference for web designers, software developers, and practitioners in a wide variety of fields and disciplines.

This research aims at synthesizing literature on social capital theory and OSS communities to arrive at a conceptual model of social capital and individuals' value creation in OSS communities. Accordingly, it targets at replicating prior research that used social capital to predict diverse forms of outcome by using alternative operationalizations of the different social capital dimensions as well as forms of outcome and includes firm-sponsorship as moderator into the models. As a result of this research, it can be noted that the proven relationship between an OSS contributor's social capital and his created value is affected by firm-sponsorship. Furthermore, it could be shown that the proven relationship between an OSS contributor's social capital and associated individual outcomes is not affected by firm-sponsorship.