The open source movement evolved in the one industrial context where openness is not required by intellectual property law.1 Nevertheless, openness itself cannot be the driving force behind the open source movement. This is because openness can be achieved in many ways other than the GPL, for...

Community source development has emerged as a new way of developing enterprise applications, leading to a unique type of open source development involving collaborative investment decisions by multiple institutional partners. A critical research question is what motivates partnering institutions...

This paper argues that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. We define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) modularity and (2) option value. Developers can often make informed judgments about modularity and...

Product development within and across community-based and geographically dispersed virtual organizations is becoming an increasingly important mechanism through which individual knowledge holders create and disseminate knowledge in joint efforts to generate products. Without the benefits of...

The paper analyzes the impact of institutional and cultural factors on a remarkable economic activity: the production of so-called open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and...

During the last two decades, projects have become increasingly important and recognizable tools for achieving competitiveness, strategic aims and much needed positive changes. The consequence of this, among other things, is the growing number of projects which emerge and are carried out in all...

Modern concepts, like team collaboration and project management, have to backed up by modern software tools, with economic efficiency.

The empirical studies relative to the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) case stress the important role played by psychological and social motivations. However, the theories elaborated to cope with this dimension, such as “gift economy”, “epistemic community” or “community of...

Most research on open source software communities has focused on those that are community founded. More recently, firms have founded their own open source communities. How do sponsored open source communities differ from their autonomous counterparts? With comparative examination of 12 open...

Research on open source software, user innovation and open innovation have increasingly emphasized the role of communities in creating, shaping and disseminating innovations. However, the comparability of such studies has been hampered by the lack of a precise definition of the community...