The open source software phenomenon: Characteristics that promote research☆
Introduction
Open source software has two distinct features. First, open source software comes equipped with licenses that provide existing and future users the right to use, inspect, modify, and distribute modified and unmodified software to others (Raymond, 1999). With such open licenses, the software products aim at several market segments, covering operating systems, middleware, and end-user products, such as media players, office suites, and games. Over the last 15 years, many open source software products have made successful inroads into these segments attracting many millions of users. For example, in 2005, Apache achieved a 60% market share for web server software (Netcraft, 2007). In the same year, Firefox, the browser, achieved a 13% market share (Jano, 2006) and turned over more than 50 Million USD for the Mozilla foundation that markets and coordinates its development. Thus, business models around software development are changing and the deployment of open source solutions is a viable alternative for IT managers.
Second, while software can be classified as “open source” independently of how it was developed (it is sufficient for the software to be released with an open source license affixed), years of development have given rise to a new practice of innovation associated with open source software. Today, projects display a very distinct development process. Open source software projects are typically initiated by a “project leader” or “project entrepreneur.” Depending on their interest in the project, volunteers (or companies) join in and contribute to designing, writing, testing, debugging, distributing, and documenting the software. Depending on their knowledge, these voluntary “project contributors” perform tasks ranging from cheering, via administration and coordination, to technical development. Popular projects such as Linux or Azureus may receive the support of several thousand contributors who emerge from a much larger group of users. These contributors, in turn, provide feedback to the open source software developers, share their ideas, report software bugs, indicate new opportunities for using the software, etc. (Raymond, 1999, Lerner and Tirole, 2002, von Krogh and von Hippel, 2003). This highlights a change in the nature of how software architecture is created in an evolutionary manner rather than in a pure top-down planned style as advocated by many (e.g., Brooks, 1995).
Over the last decade, paralleling the growth in markets for open source software, studies of the open source software phenomenon have proliferated in the social sciences. Google Scholar lists more than a thousand papers using the keywords “open source software” and “social science.” In the social science citation index, out of 198 papers that have “open source software” registered as a keyword (717 when using just “open source”), roughly 75% have been published within the last 3 years. Several key journals in various fields have published special issues related to open source software, gathering focal contributions.
Research on open source software has surfaced in many disciplines and fields of the social sciences, ranging from economists over computer scientists to anthropologists, investigating various aspects of the phenomenon using a plethora of research methods. The field of information systems thrives on and contributes to “trans-disciplinary” research. According to Bob Galliers, the combination of technical, social, and human factors that impact on the performance of information systems requires an open and frequent exchange amongst researchers working in various areas and disciplines (Galliers, 2003). For the field of information systems, the open source phenomenon, thus, represents an unprecedented opportunity for such a trans-disciplinary dialog. One main question is (1) why the phenomenon has promoted this large amount of research and in the process (2) evoked the interest of researchers working in several disciplines and fields of the social science contributing to the field of information systems? This essay attempts to address these two questions by analyzing the open source phenomenon and proposes specific characteristics that promote extensive and trans-disciplinary research. The intention is to identify some “lessons learned” about the phenomenon and highlight new research opportunities. This is particularly important since the open source model of innovation is diffusing into other fields and industries including technical design, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, cultural goods, etc.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we briefly review three research streams and show that researchers from various fields and disciplines have contributed insights to these shared research questions. In Section 3, we analyze in more detail the open source software phenomenon and propose five characteristics that have led to the proliferation of multi-disciplinary research. These are impact, theoretical tension, transparency, communal reflexivity, and proximity. In Section 3.1, we conclude the paper with a call for new transdisciplinary research on information systems as it applies to the diffusion of the open source model of innovation to new fields.
Section snippets
Open source software: A fertile phenomenon for research and trans-disciplinary dialog
There are a number of research areas that are emerging surrounding the phenomenon of open source software. However, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, we classify research according to three major streams (von Krogh and von Hippel, 2006): developer motivation; governance, organization, and innovation process; and competitive dynamics. Each of these streams poses its own set of research questions that are shared by researchers from all fields and disciplines. We demonstrate this
Characteristics that promote research
Flyvbjerg (2001) calls for social sciences to have more impact on society. In particular, he notes that the problem of the social sciences is an inherent detachment from reality. Natural science, in contrast, is interwoven with reality and, thus, does not face the same problems. The criticism of social sciences typically poses an urgent question: “If you are wrong about this, who would notice?” Flyvbjerg proposes a number of remedies to the problem detachment in the social sciences, of which
Conclusion
In this essay, we briefly reviewed select research contributions that shed light on the open source software phenomenon. These contributions come from different fields and we argued that the phenomenon brought forth an important trans-disciplinary dialog. Subsequently, we attempted to define the characteristics of the open source software phenomenon that triggered a massive amount of research from different fields and disciplines. These were impact of the phenomenon, transparency of the
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This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant # 100012-101805).