Abstract
The success of the Open Source model of software development depends on the voluntary participation of external developers (the peripheral developers), a group that can have distinct motivations from that of project founders (the core developers). In this study, we examine peripheral developer participation by empirically examining approximately 2,600 open source projects. In particular, we hypothesize that peripheral developer participation is higher when the potential for building reputation by gaining recognition from project stakeholders is higher. We consider recognition by internal stakeholders (such as core developers) and external stakeholders (such as end-users and peers). We find a positive association between peripheral developer participation and the potential of stakeholder recognition after controlling for bug reports, feature requests, and other key factors. Our findings provide important insights for OSS founders and corporate managers for open sourcing or OSS adoption decisions.
- F. B. Abreu. 1995. The MOOD metrics set. In Proceedings of ECOOP'95. 267.Google Scholar
- P. Ågerfalk and B. Fitzgerald. 2008. Outsourcing to an unknown workforce: Exploring opensourcing as a global sourcing strategy. MIS Quarterly 32, 2, 385--409. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. D. Banker, G. B. Davis, and S. A. Slaughter. 1998. Software development practices, software complexity, and software maintenance performance: A field study. Management Science 44 433--450. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. E. Barth and S. Kallapur. 1996. The effects of cross sectional scale differences on regression results in empirical accounting research. Contemporary Accounting Research 13, 2, 527--567.Google ScholarCross Ref
- G. S. Becker. 1976. Altruism, egoism and genetic fitness: Economics and sociobiology. Journal of Economic Literature 14, 3, 817--826Google Scholar
- G. Burtch, A. Ghose, and S. Wattal. 2013. An empirical examination of the antecedents and consequences of contribution patterns in crowd-funded markets. Information Systems Research 24, 3, 499--519.Google ScholarCross Ref
- F. P. Brooks. 1975. The mythical man-month. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Reliable Software (Los Angeles, CA, April 21--23, 1975). ACM Press, New York, 193. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. C. Cameron and P. K. Trivedi. 1998. Regression Analysis of Count Data Book. 1st edition. Econometric Society Monograph No. 30. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- S. Chengalur-Smith and A. Sidorova. 2003. Survival of open-source projects: A population ecology perspective. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Information Systems, Association for Information Systems.Google Scholar
- S. R. Chidamber and C. F. Kemerer. 1994. A metrics suite for object oriented design. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 20, 6. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Crowston, J. Howison, and H. Annabi. 2006. Information systems success in free and open source software development: Theory and measures. Software Process: Improvement and Practice (Special Issue on Free/Open Source Software Processes). Vol. 11, pp 123--148.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. Curtis, S. B. Sheppard, P. Millman, M. A. Brost, and T. Love. 1979. Measuring the psychological complexity of software maintenance tasks with the Halstead and McCabe metrics. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-2, 2. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Dahlander and M. Magnusson. 2008. How do firms make use of open source communities? Long Range Planning 41.Google Scholar
- Y. Fang and D. Neufeld. 2009. Understanding sustained participation in open source software projects. Journal of Management Information Systems 25, 4. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Fershtman and N. Gandal. 2007. Open source software: Motivation and restrictive licensing. International Economics and Economic Policy 4, 2.Google ScholarCross Ref
- W. Green. 2007. Functional Form and Heterogeneity in Models for Count Data. Department of Economics, Stern School of Business, New York University, Working Paper 07--10, 2007.Google Scholar
- B. Golden. 2004. Succeeding with Open Source. Addison Wesley. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Goeminne and T. Mens. 2011. Evidence for the pareto principle in open source activity. Joint Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Model Driven Software Maintenance and 5th International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability. 74--82.Google Scholar
- R. A. Guth. 2006. Trolling the web for free labor, software upstarts are new force. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2006. Last accessed May 4, 2007 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116338621999421269.html.Google Scholar
- M. H. Halstead. 1977. Elements of Software Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier North Holland. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Hars and S. Ou. 2001, Working for free? Motivations of participating in open source projects. In Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. S. Hammond, M. Gerush, and J. Silekis. 2009. Open source moves into the mainstream. Forrester Inc. Report. https://www.forrester.com/Open+Source+Software+Goes+Mainstream/fulltext/-/E-res54205. Last accessed: Dec 20 2015.Google Scholar
- J. Howison and K. Crowston. 2004. The perils and pitfalls of mining sourceforge. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories. 7--11.Google Scholar
- F. Hunt and P. Johnson. 2002. On the pareto distribution of sourceforge projects. In Proceedings of the F/OSS Software Development Workshop. 122--129.Google Scholar
- K. R. Jayanth. 2009. Essays on Software Development. Doctoral Dissertation. Graduate Program in Management Science. University of Texas at Dallas.Google Scholar
- A. Kaltenbrunner, V. Gomez, and V. Lopez. 2007. Description and prediction of Slashdot activity. In Proceedings of the 5th Latin American Web Congress (LA-WEB). Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. J. Kauffman, A. A. Techatassanasoontorn, and B. Wang. 2012. Event history, spatial analysis and count data methods for empirical research in information systems. Information Technology and Management 13, 3, 115--147. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. M. Kelty. 2001. Free software/free science. First Monday {S.l.}, Dec. 2001. ISSN 13960466. Last accessed February 17, 2014 at http://pear.accc.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/902/811. doi:10.5210/fm.v6i12.902.Google Scholar
- S. C. Kolm and J. M. Ythier. 2006. Handbook of the economics of giving, altruism and reciprocity: Foundations. Amsterdam: North Holland, Elsevier.Google Scholar
- S. Krishnamurthy. 2002. Cave or community? An empirical examination of 100 mature open source projects. First Monday 7(4). http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_6/Krishnamurthy/index.html.Google Scholar
- J. Kunegis, A. Lommatzsch, and C. Bauckhage. 2009. The Slashdot Zoo: Mining a social network with negative edges. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference on WWW. 741--750. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Lakhani and E. von Hippel. 2003. How open source software works: “Free” user-to-user assistance. Research Policy 32, 923--943.Google ScholarCross Ref
- K. Lakhani and R. Wolf. 2005. Why hackers do what they do: Understanding motivation and effort in free/open source software projects. In Perspectives in Free and Open Source Software, Joe Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani (Eds.). Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
- C. Lampe, E. Johnston, and P. Resnick. 2007, Follow the reader: Filtering comments on Slashdot. In Proceedings of the 25th CHI. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Lerner and J. Tirole. 2002. Some simple economics of open source. Journal of Industrial Economics 52, 197--234.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Lerner and J. Tirole. 2005. The scope of open source licensing. Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 21, 20--56.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. Lev, C. Petrovits, and R. Radhakrishnan. 2010. Is doing good good for you? How corporate charitable contributions enhance revenue growth. Strategic Management Journal 31, 182--200.Google Scholar
- G. S. Maddala. 1983. Limited-Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Economics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- G. S. Maddala. 1991. A perspective on the use of limited-dependent and qualitative variables models in accounting research. Accounting Review 66, 788--806.Google Scholar
- G. Madey, V. Freeh, and T Tynan. 2002. The open source software development phenomenon: An analysis based on social network theory. In Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems, Dallas, Texas, 1806--1813.Google Scholar
- K. S. Mathias, J. H. Cross, T. D. Hendrix, and L. A. Barowski. 1999. The role of software measures and metrics in studies of program comprehension. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Southwest Regional Conference (ACM-SE 37). 13. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. J. McCabe. 1976. A complexity measure. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 308--320. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. C. Meister. 2013. Make sure your dream company can find you. Harvard Business Review Blog. Last accessed January 12, 2013, from http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/make-sure-your-dream-company-can-find-you/.Google Scholar
- V. Midha. 2008. Does complexity matter? The impact of change in structural complexity on software maintenance and new developer's contributions in open source software. ICIS 2008 Proceedings. Paper 37.Google Scholar
- J. Marlow, L. Dabbish, and J. Herbsleb. 2013. Impression formation in online peer production: Activity traces and personal profiles in github. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 117--128. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Oh and S. Jeon. 2007. Membership herding and network stability in the open source community: The ising perspective. Management Science 53, 7, 1086--1101. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Raymond. 1999. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. A. Roberts, Il-Horn Hann, and S. A. Slaughter. 2006. Understanding the motivations, participation, and performance of open source software developers: A longitudinal study of the Apache projects. Management Science 52, 7, 984--999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. M. Schweik and R. C. English. 2012. Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software Commons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Simon. 1993. Altruism and economics. American Economic Review 83, 2, 156--161.Google Scholar
- K. J. Stewart, A. P. Ammeter, and L. M Maruping. 2006. Impacts of license choice and organizational sponsorship on user interest and development activity in open source software projects. Information Systems Research 17, 2, 126. Google ScholarDigital Library
- I. Stamelos, L. Angelis, A. Oikonomou, and G. L. Bleris. 2002. Code quality analysis in open source software development. Information Systems Journal 12, 43--60.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. Van Antwerp and G. Madey. 2008. Advances in the sourceforge research data archive (SRDA). In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Open Source Systems, IFIP 2.13 (WoPDaSD 2008), Milan, Italy, September 2008.Google Scholar
- G. Von Krogh, S. Spaeth, and K. R. Lakhani. 2003. Community, joining and specialization in open source software innovation: A case study. Research Policy 32 (2003) 1217--1241.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P. Wagstrom. 2009. Vertical Interaction in Open Software Engineering Communities. Doctoral Dissertation. Carnegie Institute of Technology and School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Wagstrom, A. Mockus, J. D. Herbsleb, and R. E. Kraut. 2010. The impact of commercial organizations on volunteer participation in online Montreal, Canada, August 2 community. In Proceedings of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting.Google Scholar
- A. Wiggins, J. Howison, and K. Crowston. 2009. Heartbeat: Measuring active user base and potential user interest in FLOSS projects. In Proceedings of 5th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2009), C. Boldyreff, K. Crowston, B. Lundell, and A. I. Wasserman (Eds.), Skövde, Sweden, June 3, 94--104.Google Scholar
- J. M. Wooldridge. 2002. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.Google Scholar
- C. Wu, J. H. Gerlach, and C. E. Young. 2007. An empirical analysis of open source software developers' motivations and continuance intentions. Information & Management 44, 3, 253--262. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. F. Wurster. 2008. User survey analysis: Open source software, worldwide. 2008. Gartner Report. Last accessed March 20, 2009, at http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=801412.Google Scholar
- J. Xu, Y. Gao, S. Christley, and G. Madey. 2005. A topological analysis of the open source software development community. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Ye and K. Kishida. 2003. Towards an understanding of the motivation of open source software developers. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Z. E. Zheng, P. Fader, and B. Padmanabhan. 2012. From business intelligence to competitive intelligence: Inferring competitive measures using augmented site-centric data. Information Systems Research 23, 3, 698--720.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Peripheral Developer Participation in Open Source Projects: An Empirical Analysis
Recommendations
Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla
According to its proponents, open source style software development has the capacity to compete successfully, and perhaps in many cases displace, traditional commercial development methods. In order to begin investigating such claims, we examine data ...
Open Source Developer Layer Assessment: Open Onion
Open Source developers play fundamental determinant role in the life of any open source project. This paper investigates developer motivation in contributing tirelessly to an open source project. Open source Onions were investigated and the developer ...
Volunteers' participation in open source software development: a study from the social-relational perspective
Open source software comprises a revolutionary new model of software development and distribution. Widespread Internet access in the early 1990s led to a dramatic acceleration of open source activity; but the success of a community open source project ...
Comments