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07.08.08 Community And Sponsored Open Source Development  By Roberto Galoppini Classifying Open Source production models is not an academic curiosity, as result from recent conversations on how the development model affects at large the software life-cycle and, more important, the business strategy. Theodor Ts'o opened a conversation about organic vs non organic open source development, following a Mozilla's organic definition. Matthew Aslett later reopened the discussion further exploring the bee keeper analogy, getting some reactions from Stormy Peters and James Dixon (original author of the Bee Keeper model). Beyond definitions, the way open source firms cope with their communities, and how their business is affected by the relationship, worth some attention. The relationships between firms and communities in open source software has been analyzed by very few academic papers so far. Dahlander and Magnusson in their paper "Relationships between open source software companies and communities: Observations from Nordic firms" distinguished three different approaches to handle the firm-community relationship: symbiotic, commensalistic, and parasitic. Managerial issues vary depending on the chosen approach. The symbiotic approach seem to be the most promising in terms of the possibility to influence the community, but firms adopting it are also confronted with challenging managerial issues related to decision rights and control. West and O'Mahony in "contrasting community building in sponsored and community founded open source projects" investigated how changes in building and attracting an "external" when open source firms spin out internally developed code. The following table from the paper reports key issues for community-led and sponsored open source projects.
 The paper suggests that ongoing relationships between the sponsor and the community face a trade-off between appropriating returns from the commons versus providing incentives for external participants to join the community. As a matter of fact unilateral decisions and legal obligations make difficult recruiting contributors. On the contrary governance mechanisms enabling the sponsor to determine project's evolution through pluralistic support are definitely of help in this respect. Apache, the Collaborative Software Initiative, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org or SAKAI seem to follow very different approaches to community building, technology transfer and fostering open source ecosystems. That is for another post, maybe more than one: I will make some interview before reaching any conclusion, in any. Comments About the Author: In 2001 started up a small firm specialized in infrastructural solutions based on Open Source software. In 2004 launched the first Italian consortium of Open Source SMEs, becoming its president. Collaborates to academy research on Open Source organizational models and on Open Source meta-districts, keeps rubrics and writes articles on ICT magazines. http://robertogaloppini.net |
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