The attraction of contributors in free and open source software projects

Autor(es)

Santos, Carlos ^[1] ; Kuk, George ^[2] ; Kon, Fabio ^[3] ; Pearson, John ^[4]

Afiliação do(s) autor(es)

^[1] Univ Brasilia, Dept Management, BR-70910900 Brasilia, DF - Brazil

^[2] Univ Nottingham, Sch Business, Nottingham NG7 2RD - England

^[3] Univ Sao Paulo, Dept Comp Sci, Inst Math & Stat, BR-05508090 Sao Paulo - Brazil

^[4] So Illinois Univ, Dept Management Informat Syst, Coll Business, Carbondale, IL 62901 - USA

• Tipo de documento: Artigo Científico
• Fonte: JOURNAL OF STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS; v. 22, n. 1, p. 26-45, MAR 2013.
• Citações Web of Science: 21

Resumo

As firms increasingly sanction an open sourcing strategy, the question of which open source project to undertake remains tentative. The lack of established metrics makes it difficult to formulate such strategy. While many projects have been formed and created, only a few managed to remain active. With the majority of these projects failing, firms need a reliable set of criteria to assess what makes a project appealing not only to developers but also to visitors, users and commercial sponsors. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to explore the contextual and causal factors of project attractiveness in inducing activities such as source code contribution, software maintenance, and usage. We test our model with data derived from more than 4000 projects spanning 4 years. Our main findings include that projects' set of conditions such as license restrictiveness and their available resources provide the context that directly influence the amount of work activities observed in the projects. It was also found that indirect and unintended contributions such as recommending software, despite of being non-technical, cannot be ignored for project activeness, diffusion and sustainability. Finally, our analysis provide evidence that higher attractiveness leads to more code-related activities with the downside of slowing down responsiveness to address projects' tasks, such as the implementation of new features and bug fixes. Our model underscores the significance of the reinforcing effects of attractiveness and work activities in open source projects, giving us the opportunity to discuss strategies to manage common traps such as the liability of newness. We conclude by discussing the applicability of the research model to other user-led initiatives. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (AU)

• Processo FAPESP: 09/02046-2 - O Papel da Atratividade dos Projetos de Software Livre ao longo dos seus Ciclos-de-Vida: Um Estudo Longitudinal-Empírico
• Beneficiário: Carlos Denner dos Santos Júnior
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Pós-Doutorado