Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open Source Software Mode of Production

Early contributions to the academic literature on free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS) movements have been directed primarily at identifying the motivations that account for the sustained and often intensive involvement of many people in this non-contractual and unremunerated productive activity. This issue has been particularly prominent in economists’ contributions to the literature, and it reflects a view that widespread voluntary participation in the creation of economically valuable goods that is to be distributed without charge constitutes a significant behavioral anomaly. Undoubtedly, the motivations of F/LOSS developers deserve to be studied more intensively, but not because their behaviors are unique, or historically unprecedented. In this essay we argue that other aspects of the “open source” phenomenon are just as intriguing, if not more so, and possibly are also more consequential topics for economic analysis. We describe the re-focusing and re-direction of empirical and theoretical research in an integrated international project (based at Stanford University/SIEPR) that aims at better understanding a set of less widely discussed topics: the modes of organization, governance and performance of F/LOSS development -- viewed as a collective distributed mode of production.. We discuss of the significance of tackling those questions in order to assess the potentialities of the “open source way of working” as a paradigm for a broader class of knowledge and information- goods production, and conclude with proposals for the trajectory of future research along that line.

Legal tools of public participation in the Environmental Impact Assessment process and their application in the countries of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region

The article focuses on research of existing legal tools of public participation in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process and on practical issues of their application in the countries of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR). The EIA is mandatory for projects which can have negative impacts on the environment and/or human health. Public participation in the EIA is one of the instruments used both on the international and national level that helps prevent or minimise the negative consequences of the project for the environment and human health. This article is based on research of national EIA legislation and on the analysis of the findings from interviews conducted with private and public organisations during benchmarking visits and fact-finding trips to the northern regions of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Northwest Russia. In addition, feedback was collected from participants during four seminars. Participatory methods, focused on public‒private communication and participation during the environmental impact assessment process, provides the theoretical basis for the article. This research results from work in a two-year strategic project funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation Tekes.publishedVersio

Motivation and Sorting in Open Source Software Innovation

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation, and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. Unlike previous literature based on survey data, we exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the .revealed preference. of developers - to infer the underlying incentives driving the decision to contribute source code. Using detailed information on code contributions and project membership, we classify software developers into distinct types and study how contributions from each developer type vary according to the open source license type and other project characteristics. We find that developers strongly sort by license type, project size, and corporate sponsorship, and that reciprocity is important only for a small subset of projects. We also show that contributions have a substantial impact on the performance of open source projects.open source software, innovation, incentives, intrinsic motivation, motivated agents, reputation, reciprocity

Studying Attitudes and Social Norms in Agile Software Development

The purpose of this paper is to review research on attitudes and social norms and connect it to the agile software development context. Furthermore, I propose additional theories from social psychology (mainly the theory of planned behavior and using the degree of internalization of social norms) that would most certainly be useful for further sense-making of human factors-related research on agile teams.Comment: Accepted at XP2018 Poster Track Sessio

How Early Participation Determines Long-Term Sustained Activity in GitHub Projects?

Although the open source model bears many advantages in software development, open source projects are always hard to sustain. Previous research on open source sustainability mainly focuses on projects that have already reached a certain level of maturity (e.g., with communities, releases, and downstream projects). However, limited attention is paid to the development of (sustainable) open source projects in their infancy, and we believe an understanding of early sustainability determinants is crucial for project initiators, incubators, newcomers, and users. In this paper, we aim to explore the relationship between early participation factors and long-term project sustainability. We leverage a novel methodology combining the Blumberg model of performance and machine learning to predict the sustainability of 290,255 GitHub projects. Specificially, we train an XGBoost model based on early participation (first three months of activity) in 290,255 GitHub projects and we interpret the model using LIME. We quantitatively show that early participants have a positive effect on project's future sustained activity if they have prior experience in OSS project incubation and demonstrate concentrated focus and steady commitment. Participation from non-code contributors and detailed contribution documentation also promote project's sustained activity. Compared with individual projects, building a community that consists of more experienced core developers and more active peripheral developers is important for organizational projects. This study provides unique insights into the incubation and recognition of sustainable open source projects, and our interpretable prediction approach can also offer guidance to open source project initiators and newcomers.Comment: The 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2023