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this report is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation #IIS-0083075, #ITR-0205679 and #ITR-0205724. No endorsement implied. Mark Ackerman at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor; Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; John Noll at the Santa Clara University; Chris Jensen, Mark Bergman, and Xiaobin Li at the UCI Institute for Software Research, and also Julia Watson at The Ohio State University are collaborators on the research project that produced this chapter. 1 1

Theorists often speculate why open source and free software project contributors give their work away. Although contributors make their work publicly available, they do not forfeit their rights to it. Community managed software projects protect their work by using several legal and normative tactics, which should not be conflated with a disregard for or neglect of intellectual property rights. These tactics allow a project's intellectual property to be publicly and freely available and yet, governable. Exploration of this seemingly contradictory state may provide new insight into governance models for the management of digital intellectual property. Key Words: Software, Public Goods, Open Source, Intellectual Property, Common Pool Resources *Contact: Siobhn O'Mahony; Negotiations, Organization and Markets group, Harvard Business School, Baker Library West 186, Soldiers Field, Boston, MA 02163, USA; Tel: +1 617 495 0875; Fax: +1 617 496 7379; E-mail: somahony@hbs.edu This research was in part supported by the Stanford University's Center for Work, Technology and Organization, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and funds provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Social Science Research Council's Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution. Special thanks to the editors and reviewers for their helpful comments, to my informants for their time and interest and to Stephen Barley, Robert Sutton, Josh Lerner, Carliss Baldwin, George Baker, Victor Seidel, Fabrizio Ferraro, Mark Mortensen, Michael Schrage, Rachel Campagna and Jason Owen-Smith for their always thoughtful comments on the formation of these ideas and earlier versions of this paper. It's kind of cool to bring the power to where it belongs and what's really exciting about working with the hack...

In this paper, we present results from the study of a free software development virtual organization, the GNU Enterprise (GNUe) project, and how they develop software in a globally distributed free software development project. In particular, examples of how they mitigate and resolve conflict are presented. Conflict arises over the use of a non-free tool to create GNUe graphic, and over the use of a non-free tool for GNUe documentation. The GNUe developers resolve the conflict using internet relay chat (IRC), threaded email discussions, and community digests. We characterize the GNUe developers as an occupational subculture within the occupational community of free/open source software (F/OSS) developers and show how the beliefs in free software and freedom of choice, and values in cooperative work and community assist GNUe contributors in mitigating and resolving conflict. In addition, we show how, despite fluctuating boundaries of membership in a virtual organization, daily discussions on the GNUe IRC serve to build and perpetuate the global community of GNUe contributors as well as F/OSS developers in general.

Prior characterizations of open source projects have been based on the model of a community-founded project. More recently, a second model has emerged, where organizations spinout internally developed code to a public forum. Based on field work on open source projects, we compare the lifecycle differences between these two models. We identify problems unique to spinout projects, particularly in attracting and building an external community. We illustrate these issues with a feasibility analysis of a proposed open source project based on VistA, the primary healthcare information system of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This example illuminates the complexities of building a community after a code base has been developed and suggests that open source software can be used to transfer technology to the private sector. 1.

Open source software, or free software, has generated much interest and debate in the wake of a number of high-impact applications and systems produced under open source models for development and distribution. Despite the high degree of interest, little hard data exists to-date on the membership of collaborative open source communities and the evolutionary process of their repositories. This paper contributes a baseline quantitative study of one of the oldest continuous repositories for the Linux open source project (the UNC MetaLab Linux Archives), including demographic information on its broad community of developers. Our methodology is a close examination of collection statistics, including custom monitoring scripts on the server, as well as an analysis of the contents of user-generated metadata embedded within the Archives. User-generated metadata files in a format known as the Linux Software Map (LSM) are required when submitting open source software for inclusion in non-mirrored...

This paper aims to develop a stochastic simulation structure capable of describing the decentralized, micro-level decisions that allocate programming resources both within and among open source/free software (OS/FS) projects, and that thereby generate an array of OS/FS system products each of which possesses particular qualitative attributes. The core or behavioral kernel of simulation tool presented here represents the effects of the reputational reward structure of OS/FS communities (as characterized by Raymond 1998) to be the key mechanism governing the probabilistic allocation of agents' individual contributions among the constituent components of an evolving software system. In this regard, our approach follows the institutional analysis approach associated with studies of academic researchers in "open science" communities. For the purposes of this first step, the focus of the analysis is confined to showing the ways in which the specific norms of the reward system and organizational rules can shape emergent properties of successive releases of code for a given project, such as its range of functions and reliability. The global performance of the OS/FS mode, in matching the functional and other characteristics of the variety of software systems that are produced with the needs of users in various sectors of the economy and polity, obviously, is a matter of considerable importance that will bear upon the long-term viability and growth of this mode of organizing production and distribution. Our larger objective, therefore, is to arrive at a parsimonious characterization of the workings of OS/FS communities engaged across a number of projects, and their collective productive performance in dimensions that are amenable to "social welfare" evaluation....

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This study is part of an ongoing comparative study of various types of open software communities including both free and open source software projects. This study examines how the organizational cultural beliefs and values of a free software virtual organization influence software development processes. It provides examples that illustrate the importance of personal motivation and a sense of working as a team in the perpetuation of a virtual work community. It presents the world of the GNUenterprise.org project as a virtual organizational culture that embodies the beliefs of free software and freedom of choice, and the values of community building and cooperative work. A close study of this project shows how these beliefs and values are manifested in software development methods, artifacts, and tool choice, as well as how dispersed developers cooperate and resolve conflict in a virtual community. Data collection includes the content analysis of Internet Relay Chat archives; kernel cousins archives (summary digests of IRC and mailing list archives); mailing list archives; email interviews; Web site documents and observations; and personal interviews conducted at two open source conferences. Two cases from IRC and mailing list archives of the GNUe virtual community at work are presented for in-depth analyses and comparison. Cultural beliefs and values combined with

In this paper we suggest that historical studies of technology can help us to account for some, perplexing (at least for traditional economic reasoning) features of open source software development. When looked in historical perspective, open source software seems to be a particular case of what Robert Allen has termed "collective invention". We explore the interpretive value of this historical parallel in detail, comparing open source software with two remarkable episodes of nineteenth century technical advances.