Contrasting Community Building in Sponsored and Community Founded Open Source Projects

Prior characterizations of open source projects have been based on the model of a community-founded project. More recently, a second model has emerged, where organizations spinout internally developed code to a public forum. Based on field work on open source projects, we compare the lifecycle differences between these two models. We identify problems unique to spinout projects, particularly in attracting and building an external community. We illustrate these issues with a feasibility analysis of a proposed open source project based on VistA, the primary healthcare information system of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This example illuminates the complexities of building a community after a code base has been developed and suggests that open source software can be used to transfer technology to the private sector

Challenges of open innovation: the paradox of firm investment in open-source software

Open innovation is a powerful framework encompassing the generation, capture, and employment of intellectual property at the firm level. We identify three fundamental challenges for firms in applying the concept of open innovation: finding creative ways to exploit internal innovation, incorporating external innovation into internal development, and motivating outsiders to supply an ongoing stream of external innovations. This latter challenge involves a paradox, why would firms spend money on R&D efforts if the results of these efforts are available to rival firms? To explore these challenges, we examine the activity of firms in opensource software to support their innovation strategies. Firms involved in open-source software often make investments that will be shared with real and potential rivals. We identify four strategies firms employ – pooled R&D/product development, spinouts, selling complements and attracting donated complements – and discuss how they address the three key challenges of open innovation. We conclude with suggestions for how similar strategies may apply in other industries and offer some possible avenues for future research on open innovation

Incentives for organizations to publish software source code

The software stack opened under Open Source Software (OSS) licenses is growing rapidly. Commercial actors have released considerable amounts of previously proprietary source code. These actions beg the question why companies choose a strategy based on giving away software assets? Research on outbound OSS approach has tried to answer this question with the concept of the “OSS business model”. When studying the reasons for code release, we have observed that the business model concept is too generic to capture the many incentives organizations have. Conversely, in this paper we investigate empirically what the companies’ incentives are by means of an exploratory case study of three organizations in different stages of their code release. Our results indicate that the companies aim to promote standardization, obtain development resources, gain cost savings, improve the quality of software, increase the trustworthiness of software, or steer OSS communities. We conclude that future research on outbound OSS could benefit from focusing on the heterogeneous incentives for code release rather than on revenue models

Freedom and forking in open source software: the MariaDB story

While significant factors that affect the open source community’s interest to participate in a development project have been studied, there has been little focus on the motivating factors that can cause a contributor to become a competitor by utilizing the right to fork a program i.e., to copy an existing program’s code base and use it to begin a separate development. The right to copy an existing program’s code base and use it to begin a separate development is guaranteed by all open source licenses. However, this right to fork a program is rarely exercised. Indeed, there is strong social pressure against code forking stemming from the negative side effects of code forking, such as conflict and duplicated efforts among developers. This paper details the events that led Widenius, the founder of the MySQL project, to decide to fork MariaDB from MySQL. Our findings confirm the previously held notion that there is a high threshold for starting a competing fork. While the few studies that exist of competitive forks find the reasons to be due to disagreement among developers, in the case of MariaDB the fork was caused by Widenius’ concerns regarding the uncertainty of the future freedom and openness of the MySQL codebase. This article makes three contributions. Firstly, it further validates the existing notion that there is a strong threshold to starting a competing fork. Secondly, it offers an in-depth analysis of the events and motivations behind the birth of a fork. Thirdly, it contributes to theory by introducing the freedom factor hypothesis: limiting either developers’ freedoms to contribute to a project or the freedom inherent in a project's license increases the likelihood of a fork

Knowledge Sharing in Platform Ecosystems through Sponsored Online Communities: The Influence of User Roles and Media Richness

Platform ecosystems are characterized by knowledge boundaries that arise between the platform owner and third-party developers. Although major platform owners such as Microsoft and SAP nurture sponsored online communities to overcome knowledge boundaries in their ecosystem, the peculiarities of such communities are yet to be examined. Drawing upon the lead user and media richness theory, we investigate how different user roles and media types influence the value of a knowledge contribution in such communities. Analyzing one million answers from the SAP Community, we uncovered that both lead users and sponsor representatives are more likely to provide valuable knowledge contributions compared to normal users. Moreover, we show that attachments, code snippets, and links significantly enhance the value of a knowledge contribution. Surprisingly, we find a strong negative moderation effect of code snippets on the contributions of sponsor representatives, but a strong positive moderation effect on the contributions of lead users

Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds: Designing an IT-supported Ideas Competition for an

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Open Source Software: The New Intellectual Property Paradigm

Open source methods for creating software rely on developers who voluntarily reveal code in the expectation that other developers will reciprocate. Open source incentives are distinct from earlier uses of intellectual property, leading to different types of inefficiencies and different biases in R&D investment. Open source style of software development remedies a defect of intellectual property protection, namely, that it does not generally require or encourage disclosure of source code. We review a considerable body of survey evidence and theory that seeks to explain why developers participate in open source collaborations instead of keeping their code proprietary, and evaluates the extent to which open source may improve welfare compared to proprietary development.

Software Innovation and the Open Source threat

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS) and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit organization whose basic software is OS and it is distributed for free. The OS firm, however, is able to make profits from selling complementary software and, on the cost side, it receives development help from a community of users. I first compare a duopoly composed by two PS firms with a mixed duopoly of a PS and OS firm and I find that a PS duopoly might generate more innovation than a mixed duopoly if the initial technological gap between firms is small. However if this gap is large, a PS duopoly generates less innovation than a mixed duopoly. I then extend the setting to allow PS firms to switch to OS or to remain PS. A PS firm wants to become OS if it gets behind enough in the technological race against a competitor. I find that the outside option to become OS might soften competition on innovation since the technological leader prefers to reduce his innovation investment to avoid the OS switch of the follower. Therefore, although the switch to OS could generate higher investment levels ex-post it might generate lower investment ex-ante. In this context I nd that a government subsidy to OS firms could be potentially harmful for innovation