Decoding the "Free/Open Source(F/OSS) Software Puzzle" a survey of theoretical and empirical contributions

F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased exponentially. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sufficiently comprehensive account of these contributions in order to draw some general conclusions on the state of our understanding of the phenomenon and identify directions for future research. The exercise suggests that what is puzzling about F/OSS is not so much the fact that people freely contribute to a good they make available to all, but rather the complexity of its institutional structure and its ability to organizationally evolve over time.F/OSS software, Innovation, Incentives, Governance, Intellectual Property Rights

Consequences of Unhappiness While Developing Software

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding the positive side of happiness -- positive emotions and moods -- is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that also studying the negative side -- unhappiness -- could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, and is mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we attempt to uncover the experienced consequences of unhappiness among software developers. Using qualitative data analysis of the responses given by 181 questionnaire participants, we identified 49 consequences of unhappiness while doing software development. We found detrimental consequences on developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data, will spawn new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.Comment: 6 pages. To be presented at the Second International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering, colocated with the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'17). Extended version of arXiv:1701.02952v2 [cs.SE

Concurrentie, innovatie en intellectuele eigendomsrechten in software markten

This study analyzes under which circumstances it may be desirable for the government to stimulate open source software as a response to market failures in software markets. To consider whether policy intervention can increase dynamic efficiency, we discuss the differences between proprietary software and open source software with respect to the incentives to innovate and market failures that may occur. The document proposes guidelines to determine which types of policy intervention may be suitable. Our most important finding is that directly stimulating open source software, e.g. by acting as a lead customer, can improve dynamic efficiency if (i) there is a serious customer lock-in problem, while (ii) to develop the software, there is no need to purchase specific, complementary inputs at a substantial cost, and (iii) follow-on innovations are socially valuable but there are impediments to contractual agreements between developers that aim at realizing such innovations. This publication is in Dutch.

Transition of Governance in a Mature Open Software Source Community: Evidence from the Debian Case

As flourishing, productive open source software (OSS) communities mature, they have to introduce a variety of governance mechanisms to manage the participation of their members and to coordinate the launch of new releases. In contrast to other modes of governance of OSS communities, the Debian community introduced new mechanisms of informal administrative control based on a constitution, elected leaders and new functions attributed to interactive communication channels (like mailing lists or IRC channels) that can provide for community effects (and feedback). We show that these control mechanisms were introduced as a response to emerging innovative opportunities due the usage of source packages and heterogeneous learning processes by different groups within the Debian community.Open Source Software community, Governance Mechanism, Debian Community

If not for money for what? Digging into the OS/FS contributors’ motivations

This paper analyses the data collected by two of the most significant surveys on the Open Source Software (OSS) contributors’ motivations with the aim of assessing if in the OSS products circulation we can recognise the characteristics of the modern way of giving, suggested by Godbout (2000). The analysis of the information collected seems to confirm that the intrinsic motivations (social/community and political) prevail over the extrinsic ones (monetary and signalling) when developers decide to join and stay in the OS community and that the feeling of reciprocity is shared by the majority of the community members. Therefore the OSS product circulation seems to fit into the characteristics of the gift circulation.open source software, reciprocity, gift economy

Agent-based Simulation of Open Source Software Evolution

We present an agent-based simulation model of open source software (OSS). To our knowledge, this is the first model of OSS evolution that includes four significant factors: productivity limited by the complexity of software modules, the software's fitness for purpose, the motivation of developers, and the role of users in defining requirements. The model was evaluated by comparing the simulated results against four measures of software evolution (system size, proportion of highly complex modules, level of complexity control work, and distribution of changes) for four large OSS systems. The simulated results resembled all the observed data, including alternating periods of growth and stagnation. The fidelity of the model suggests that the factors included here have significant effects on the evolution of OSS systems

A Research Agenda for Studying Open Source I: A Multi-Level Framework

This paper presents a research agenda for studying information systems using open source software A multi-level research model is developed at five discrete levels of analysis: (1) the artifact; (2) the individual; (3) the team, project, and community; (4) the organization; and (5) society. Each level is discussed in terms of key issues within the level. Examples are based on prior research. In a companion paper, [Niederman, et al 2006], we view the agenda through the lens of referent discipline theories

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