13. Management and Coordination of Free/Open Source Projects

Developing software in the free/open source software (F/OSS) way is fundamentally different from the conventional, closed, team-based, single-owner software project. As a consequence, managing a F/OSS project is done in a quite different way, emphasizing on people and community coordination and organization. Management organization may take extremely distant forms: absolute monarchies, oligarchies, or open source democracies, with community members voting to decide project evolution. On the other hand, not all F/OSS projects are based on pure voluntarism. Many such projects are sponsored by firms and are managed in their own way. In addition, certain extreme project transformations, such as forking, occur frequently in F/OSS. Human resource management (e.g., team building) and decision making (e.g., project cancellation) are also done in a completely different way. This chapter focuses on how human resource management and project organization are handled in F/OSS today. On the other hand, there are several areas in which, given enough research and experimentation, new tools may be provided to assist informed, successful F/OSS management, aiming to help both experienced and novice F/OSS coordinators. The chapter attempts to foresee how measurement, simulation, and antipattern techniques might help F/OSS managers in the future.