Current issues and research trends on open-source software communities

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) projects represent a new paradigm of software creation and development based on hundreds or even thousands of developers and users organised in the form of a virtual community. The success of an OSS project is closely linked to the successful organisation and development of the virtual community of support group. This paper reviews different fields and research topics related to the OSS communities such as collective intelligence, the structure of OSS communities, their success, communities as virtual organisations, motivation, shared knowledge, innovation and learning. The main challenges, results obtained, and the knowledge areas are detailed for each topic. Keywords: open source software; virtual communities; research trends; survey IntroductionThe open source software (OSS) represents a software development model in which the source code is available to programmers to view, read, modify and redistribute without the restrictions of the intellectual property rights, which is typical of proprietary software released under a licence. It stands for a radical shift from the traditional software-engineering practice, and a new and revolutionary way of software development (Moody 2001;Raymond 1999).There are important philosophical differences between the open-source and the proprietary software development. While traditional firms can derive competitive advantage from the ownership or control of internal resources, OSS firms depend on the capability to control resources which are external to the firm, in this case primarily in the form of OSS communities (Dahlander and Magnusson 2005). Another difference to the proprietary software development is that OSS projects are based on the individual contributions of dozens or even thousands of developers geographically distributed and organised as a virtual development community (Lee and Cole 2003). Its success is owing to both the optimal development of the projects (that is, the speed at which new versions are released, and its reliability, portability and scalability), and the participants from the community (Gruber and Henkel 2006;von Hippel and von Krogh 2003;Lakhani and von Hippel 2003;Martínez-Torres et al. 2010). OSS projects are based on virtual support communities (Lee and Cole 2003), that use the software and participate in their development. These * Corresponding author. Email: rmtorres@us.es Open-source phenomenon has also attracted the interest of academics and practitioners. It can be considered as a multidisciplinary research topic that have received an increasing attention during the last decade because of two reasons: firstly, its simple existence, secondly, the way it contradicts the traditional theories and common business practices (von Hippel 2007;von Hippel and von Krogh 2003;Kogut and Metiu 2001;Lerner and Tirole 2002;Wayner 2000). The importance of OSS communities has also been highlighted in several taxonomies related to the OSS research, where communities are considered part of several categories like OSS standards and ...

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“…Assessments of success typically include metrics for project popularity or market success, for example, number of releases, downloads, scale of software use i.e., market penetration, and measures of technical achievement or developer activity, for example, modularity and maintenance of source code, effort expended by developers, and number of free contributions. Factors influencing such measures tend to elucidate the organisational structure and management of FLOSS communities, paying attention to knowledge sharing and learning, articulating, for instance, the importance of collective intelligence exploited across different member categories (Martínez-Torres & Diaz-Fernandez, 2014). Amongst the research interrogating implications of success, examinations of FLOSS' capacity to compete and or displace traditional commercial competitors are of particular interest (Mockus et al, 2002).…”

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