Association for Information Systems AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) International Conference on Electronic Business ICEB 2006 Proceedings (ICEB) Fall 11-28-2006 Company Participation in Open Source Software Communities: Measuring Sustainability Niklas Vainio Ville Oksanen Tere Vadén Follow this and additional works at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/iceb2006 This material is brought to you by the International Conference on Electronic Business (ICEB) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in ICEB 2006 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact [email protected]. FRONTIERS OF E-BUSINESS RESEARCH 2006 Company Participation in Open Source Software Communities: Measuring Sustainability Niklas Vainio1; Ville Oksanen2; Tere Vadén3 1 Researcher, Hypermedia Lab, University of Tampere, [email protected] 2 Researcher, SoberIT, Helsinki University of Technology, [email protected] 3 Assistant Professor, Hypermedia Lab, University of Tampere, [email protected] term sustainability of a community. In the following, we Abstract — A framework for analysing the sustainability of a analyse four aspects of community sustainability: 1) social, community in four dimensions – social, cultural, legal and 2) cultural, 3) legal, and 4) economical. economical – is presented. The framework is further differentiated by taking into account the different types of A. Social sustainability open source software communities, particularly with regard to The social sustainability of a community depends on the their work ethics: voluntary or salary-based. In conclusion, individual characteristics of its members, on its size and the framework is tentatively applied to two communities, form, and the division of labor and power in the Debian and Eclipse. community. Keywords — open source software, communities, Surveys on free/open source software developers show a sustainability, hackers, work ethic, Debian, Eclipse variety of backgrounds, motivations and values. Multiple motivations are suggested in the literature, including I. INTRODUCTION hedonism (“just for fun”), software politics (free software ideals), altruism, identification with a community, peer- Most of the contemporary open source software recognition, personal technological needs, reputation, communities are by nature hybrid, consisting of actors with learning and working for hire [2], [3]. Different community both commercial and non-commercial interests, motivations ideologies can be identified in different projects like and backgrounds. The goals of different groups of Debian, Linux, Eclipse, OpenBSD, Creative Commons and collaborators, be they hobbyists, volunteers or paid Wikipedia. workers, diverge while there is also considerable Although in the big picture developers seem to be a convergence with regard to the technical goals of a project heterogeneous group, there is more detail when looking at (see, e.g. [1]). It is therefore good that the old image of a particular projects. For instance, in a recent survey on community full of voluntary hackers has ceded for a more Debian and Eclipse developers [1], we identified some clear realistic approach, which takes into consideration the differences between these two communities. Largest strongly increasing corporate interest and participation. The differences were that a majority of Eclipse developers are work ethic of the corporate world is entering open source paid to work on free/open source software while for almost communities. all Debian developers it is a hobby; Eclipse developers are Company participation and the work ethic it implies in on average older than in Debian, and Debian developers are communities presents both dangers and opportunities for more aware and care about political issues such as long-term sustainability. A company needs to be able to copyright and software patents. identify the systematic variation in motivation, values, The variety of personal characteristics can be either a ideology and practices between different communities in benefit or risk for sustainability. Eric Raymond's rule order to optimize its approach to each of the community “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” [4] assumes intensive projects. A wrong approach may easily prevent a large, diverse tester and developer base. In the ideal case, the company from reaching its chosen goals and – in the this group includes a whole range of users from less skilled worst case – also severely harm the community itself. to those with very specific skills, and a wide variety of Consequently, a general framework for assessing the different use cases, environments and equipment. Variation sustainability and conditions of success of a community of in aspects like socio-economical status, level of education open collaboration will be useful in generating a strategy and geographical location may increase the effectiveness of for interaction between companies and volunteers. the group. Ye & Kishida [5] describe free/open source community II. FOUR ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABILITY participant roles using an onion model. According to the Free and open communities such as Debian and Eclipse are model, at the the heart of the community is often a single by nature hybrid, consisting of actors with divergent goals person, a project leader, with several supporting core and motivations and from both commercial or non- developers around him or her. In middle layers of the onion commercial cultural backgrounds. Companies have are active developers, peripheral developers and bug fixers, increasing interest in collaborating with these communities, and on the outer layers users who participate in the which presents both dangers and opportunities for long- FRONTIERS OF E-BUSINESS RESEARCH 2006 community only by reporting bugs or following and trying Increases sustainability: to understand the software. z diverse user and developer base The outer layer of the onion is the largest group and the z large number developers group size gets smaller as we approach the center. A well- z large number of users and contact with the users known rule of thumb in sociological research on voluntary z developers in different roles (project leader, core organisations is the so-called 20/80-rule (derived from the group, bug fixers, bug submitters) with dynamics so-called Pareto Principle), according to which 20 % of the that encourage learning volunteers do 80 % of the work. It seems that software z moderately decentralized communication or power communities roughly follow this rule, with the number of structures active members drastically reducing with each step towards z a system of decision-making and division of the core [6]-[9]. Naturally, in a complex or broad project labour (such as the GNOME), the developer group is divided into several subgroups roughly corresponding with different Decreases sustainability: subtasks. z user and developer base with unified background, Krishnamurthy [10] found that 71 percent of hundred skills and use contexts most active projects on Sourceforge had five or less z small number of developers developers and 51 percent of the projects had only one z small number of users project administrator. Projects like these are probably z no prospective developer base or closed highly dependent on the project leader. The project leader development process plays an important role also in larger projects such as the z very centralized communication or power Linux kernel. Although Linus Torvalds writes only a minor structures portion of the new code, he is important for the project as a z bureaucratic system of decision-making and charismatic leader. The Linux community respects division of labour Torvalds' power partially for historical reasons, but also for B. Cultural sustainability his skills, and developers see him as essential. In 2002, the community had a “Linus doesn't scale” problem when The distinction between social and cultural sustainability is Torvalds couldn't anymore handle the flow of modifications not clear-cut: cultural meanings and artefacts have their to the kernel, and a system of trusted “lieutenants” had to effect only as embedded in social practices. However, for be build. Before that, social sustainability of the kernel the purposes of analysis we may differentiate between the community was low because of too centralized power and two by noting that the cultural sphere exists, first, on a knowledge. With the lieutenant system, (tacit) knowledge is higher level of abstraction. Cultural aspects of interaction distributed more evenly which makes it easier and more depend on interpretation, language, and coherent patterns of probable for developers lower in the hierarchy to take behaviour. Second, the cultural level is temporally different certain responsibilities if the project leader has to step down from the social. While some cultural artefacts and meanings for any reason. may change rather rapidly, there are cultural layers that Equally important for social sustainability is the system change little, if at all, during the lifetime of a generation or of decision-making and conflict resolution. As a small an individual. project grows in time, the diversity of developer opinions Cultural sustainability of a community is defined by its and views increases, creating more potential conflicts over traditions and history that create and shape its social and technical decisions. The “benevolent dictator” approach ethical norms and practices. While social sustainability