This paper investigates the role of skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We explore the hypothesis that the...

This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to...

We investigate teamwork among maintainers of open source software projects by analyzing the logs of a set of 10 large projects. Our first results suggest that collaboration among maintainers in large open-source projects seems to be generally influenced by the complexity of files as measured by...