Introduction to a roundtable on the governance of open source software: particular solutions and general lessons
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Introduction to a roundtable on the governance of open source software: particular solutions and general lessons Paul B. de Laat
Published online: 9 June 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
In the spring of 2006, the editors of the JMG asked me to stage a roundtable discussion about the topic of governance of open source software (OSS). In a call for papers the theme was announced as follows. ‘‘Since the year 2000, the phenomenon of OSS is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. How do hackers succeed in governing a seemingly chaotic process of hundreds (if not thousands) of volunteers working together? How is this apparent self-governance to be explained? Throughout, it would seem to be important to differentiate the concept of governance into governance in a strict sense: steering the actual cooperation of volunteers, and governance in a broad sense: creating wider institutional conditions for the movement to flourish as a whole. The central question of this JMGdiscussion then becomes: what instruments are at play in open source governance— in both a strict and a broad sense?’’ Thereupon, the following set of questions was posed to the participants in order to open up discussion: •
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Is the process of OSS production governed mainly by means of incentives, control, or trust? Or, more accurately, assuming that differences obtain between various OSS groups, what is the ‘bandwidth’ of incentives/control/trust actually in use for governing ‘production’ processes? And to what extent this balance has changed over time? If in your opinion incentives play a role in self-governance of open source groups, can you explain how such governance looks like (e.g., reputation concerns)?
P. B. de Laat (&) Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat 52, 9712 GL Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
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Paul B. de Laat
If in your opinion control applies to open source groups, what do you consider to be its main instruments as related to governance (e.g., hierarchical division of tasks, grading of file access, licensing)? If according to you trust applies to open source groups, what do you consider to be its main governance mechanisms (e.g., arrangements for committing code, procedures for code acceptance)? Concerning trust in particular: if participants turn out to trust each other, do you consider participants to infer trust (if so: from what sources) or simply to assume trust (cf. theories about ‘swift trust’)?
Subsequently, attention was drawn to multiple causation. ‘‘Governance mechanisms may fulfil several functions at the same time. Consider open source licenses, for example. A well-known interpretation is that this mechanism (at least the copyleft one) solves the ‘provisioning’ problem, by keeping hackers motivated to contribute. A similar, but more sophisticated interpretation is, that copyleft attracts both ‘rentseekers’ and ‘donators’ in the process, thus maximizing contributions. In addition, a broader governance effect has been observed: copy
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