Attractiveness of free and open source software projects: theoretical importance and strategies for management

Thousands of Free and Open Source Software Projects (FSP) were, and continually are, created on the Internet. This scenario increases the number of opportunities to collaborate to the same extent that it promotes competition for users and contributors, who can guide projects to superior levels, unachievable by founders alone. Thus, given that the main goal of FSP founders is to improve their projects by means of collaboration, the importance to understand and manage the capacity of attracting users and contributors to the project is established. To support researchers and founders in this challenge, the concept of attractiveness is introduced in this paper, which develops a theoretical-managerial toolkit about the causes, indicators and consequences of attractiveness, enabling its strategic management

Forking: the Invisible Hand of Sustainability in Open Source Software

The ability to create and maintain high-quality software artifacts that preserve their usability over time is one of the most essential characteristics of the software business. In such a setting, open source software offers excellent examples of sustainability. In particular, safeguarding mechanisms against planned obsolescence by any single actor are built into the very definition of open source development. The most powerful of these safeguarding mechanisms is the ability to fork the project as a whole. In this position paper, we argue that the possibility to fork any open source program serves as the invisible hand of sustainability, ensuring that the code can always remain open and that the code that best fulfills the needs of the community will live on

Attractiveness Of Free And Open Source Software Projects

Organisations and individuals release source code on the Web to improve their software by attracting peers in the strategic move of “opensourcing” that has created thousands of open source projects (e.g., Eclipse-IBM, Thunderbird-Mozilla and Linux-Torvalds). Nevertheless, most of these projects fail to attract people and never become active. To minimize this problem, we developed a theoretical model around a crucial construct (attractiveness) to open source projects, proposing its causes (project characteristics), indicators (e.g., number of members) and consequences (levels of activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion, time for task completion and software quality). We tested this model empirically using 3 samples of over 4600 projects each in a multi-sample SEM analysis. The results confirm the central role that attractiveness plays to guarantee an active and efficient community of software development, shedding new light on whether more developers increase software quality by finding and fixing more bugs and providing upgrades. They also clarify the actual causal structure involving Web page visits, downloads and members, which can be easily mistaken. Moreover, the results can provide useful insights to strategists as we discuss the impacts of license restrictiveness, software development status, type of project and intended audience on attractiveness and its consequences