ESSID 2006 European Summer School in Industrial Dyanmics – Cargese, 17-25 September
Open Source Software Communities: Motivations, Coordination and Sustainability
Paul A. David, Stanford University & University of Oxford
SUMMARY
The phenomenon of free and open source software production by communities of distributed developers, the mass of who are unpaid for their contributions has attracted attention from various quarters. This introductory lecture is focused primarily questions that have interested social scientists, rather than software engineers and intellectual property lawyers (and legal scholars). What are the defining attributes of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software)? Who are the developers, and what is motivates their participation in these activities? What are the characteristics of the “open source way of working”, or are there various modes of FLOSS development? Where large numbers of distributed voluntary contributors are involved, how can the resulting projects achieve coherence and manage to produce reliable code associated with large projects such as Linux, Apache, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, MySQL, and many others? Is FLOSS a sustainable paradigm for collective innovation in the global software market? The efforts to answer these and many related questions by exploiting the remarkable wealth of accessible quantitative data that FLOSS communities generate about their own activities make this one of the most exciting and challenging areas for interdisciplinary social science research on contemporary Internet phenomena.
(See the accompanying “Selected Reading List” for works that will be referred to in this lecture and the slide presentation.)
A SELECTED READING LIST from PAUL DAVID
Economics and the Organization of Free & Open Source Software Production
Recent Books:
S. Weber, The Success of Open Source. Cambridge MA: Harvard-HBS Press, 2004
R. A.Ghosh, ed., CODE: Collaboration, Ownership and the Digital Economy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005
J. Feller et al., eds., Perspectives on Open Source and Free Software, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press 2005
J. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, 2006
Articles, Papers in Books, Preprints:
“Open Source Developers”: Who are they, what do they do, and why?
J. Lerner and J. Tirole, The Simple Economics of Open Source, NBER Working Paper 7600 (March), 2002,
Available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7600. or Economic Perspectives on Open Source, ch.3 in J.Feller, Perspectives…2005.
K .R. Lakhani and R. G. Wolf, Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software, Ch.1 in J. Feller, et al., eds. Perspectives…2005. See pre-print available at: http://www.opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf
R.A. Ghosh, Understanding Free Software Developers: Findings from the FLOSS Study, Ch. 2 in J.Feller, Perspectives…2005. See Ghosh, et al., FLOSS Report (June 2003): www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/
P. A. David, A. H. Waterman and S. Arora, FLOSS-US Report: The Free/Libre and Open Source Developer Survey for 2003, Stanford-SIEPR Economics of Open Source Software Project. September 2003. Available at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/floss-us/report/FLOSS-US-Report.pdf
P. A. David, A Multi-dimensional View of the “Sustainability” of Free & Open Source Software Development, OSSWatch Workshop on Open Source and Sustainability, 10-12 Oxford, 2006, available at: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2006-04-10-12/presentations/pauldavid.pdf .
K.Healy and A.Schussmann, The ecology of open source software development. University of Arizona Working Paper, January 2003. Available at: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/healyschussman.pdf
How do large ‘open source’ communities work?
J.-M. Dalle, P. A. David, R.A. Ghosh, and W. E. Steinmueller, Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open Source Software Mode of Production, in How Open Will the Future Be? Social and Cultural Scenarios based on Open Standards and Open-Source Software, eds. M. Wynants and J. Cornelis, Brussels: VUB Press, (January) 2005. [Preprint available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/papers/pdf/04-03.pdf
P. A. David, J. –M. Dalle, , R. A. Ghosh, & F. A.Wolak, Free & Open Source Software Developers and ‘the Economy of Regard’: Participation and Code-Signing in the Modules of the Linux Kernel , Stanford-SIEPR Economics of Open Source Software Project. June 2004. Available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/Economy-of-Regard_8+_OWLS.pdf
J.–M. Dalle and P. A. David,’It Takes All Kinds’: A Simulation Modelling Perspective on Motivation and Coordination in Libre Software Development Projects, SIEPR Economics of Open Source Software Project. June 2006. Available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/xxxxx.pdf
K. Crowston and J. Howison, Effective Work Practices for Open Source Software Development, NSF Proposal, Univ. Syracuse, 2004. Available at: http://floss.syr.edu/proposals/NSF2004.pdf
Gregorio Robles, Jesús M. González-Barahona, Executable source code and non-executable source code: analysis and relationships, 4th Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation co-located at the 20th International Conference on Software Maintenance, Chicago, IL, USA. September 2004. Available at: http://gsyc.escet.urjc.es/~grex/scam2004-grex-jgb-final.pdf
A SELECTED READING LIST from PAUL DAVID, continued
Broader Implications: IPR, FLOSS and Information-Goods Production
J. Benkler, Coase’s Penguin or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, Yale Law Journal, 112(369), 2002. Available at: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
J. M. Garcia and W. E. Steinmueller, The Open Source Way of Working: A New Paradigm for the Division of Labour in Software Development?, SPRU-INK Working Paper. January 2003. Available at: http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/oswp1.pdf
T. O’Reilly, The Open Source Paradigm Shift, ch. 24 in J. Feller et al., Perspectives…2005. Available at: http://open.source.mit.edu/papers/OReilly.
J. Henkel, The Jukebox Mode of Innovation: a Model of Commercial Open Source Development. University of Munich Working Paper. May 2004. Available at: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/henkel.pdf
T. McGowan, Legal Aspects of Open Source Software, Ch.24 in J. Feller, Perspectives…2005. Available at:
http://www.law.umn.edu/uploads/images/253/McGowanD-OpenSource.rtf
A. Gambardella and B. H. Hall, Proprietary vs. Public Domain Licensing of Software and Research Products, Research Policy—Special Issue on “Property and the Pursuit of Knowledge,” P. A. David and B.H.Hall, eds., 35(6) July 2006.[Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science].