The governance of free/open source software projects: monolithic, multidimensional, or configurational?
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The governance of free/open source software projects: monolithic, multidimensional, or configurational? M. Lynne Markus
Published online: 14 June 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract This paper presents the results of a qualitative review and synthesis of the literature on open source governance, addressing four key questions: (1) How has open source software (OSS) governance been defined? (2) Has the phenomenon of OSS governance been conceptualized as a monolithic or multidimensional phenomenon? (3) What purposes is OSS governance hypothesized to serve? and (4) What are the dimensions of OSS governance, and how are these dimensions related to each other? The results of the review suggest a framework for future comparative and case study research on OSS governance, and they provide a basis for comparison with research on the governance of other distributed, community-based forms of content and creation. Keywords Collective action Common pool resources/public goods Coordination theory Governance Institutional theory Motivation Open source software 1 Introduction A substantial base of scholarship on open source software (OSS) governance now exists, including numerous cases studies and several cross sectional and quantitative analyses. The time has come to assess the findings and consider the implications for future research on the topic. This paper presents the results of a qualitative review and synthesis of the literature on open source governance. Four key questions are addressed. First, how has OSS governance been defined? Second, has the phenomenon of OSS governance been conceptualized as a monolithic or multidimensional phenomenon? Thirdly, what purposes has OSS governance been hypothesized to serve? And, finally, if OSS governance is considered a M. L. Markus (&) Bentley College, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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multidimensional phenomenon, what are its dimensions, and are they independent of each other or interrelated in configurations? Each of these questions is addressed below. In the process of answering the questions, a framework for future comparative and case study research on OSS governance is proposed. The results of this review can also serve as a basis for comparison with, and generalization of, research on the governance of other distributed, community-based forms of content and creation, such as wikis.
2 How has OSS governance been defined? Meaningful syntheses of research results rely on a certain degree of definitional commonality for core concepts. Therefore, the first question posed in this review is: how have researchers defined OSS governance? As Lynn et al. (2001) observed for the context of public administration, writers on the OSS movement have rarely defined the term OSS governance precisely. For example, empirical research on OSS governance has examined such diverse structures, rules, practices, and norms as the following: • •
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Impersonal institutional mechanisms such as sof
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