Economic Organization and Viability of Open Source Software

开源软件依赖于世界各地的开发人员的专业知识，他们自愿合作开发软件。他们的合作模式要求参与者与他人自由分享他们的工作成果。通过揭示他们所工作的程序的源代码，参与这些合作的开发人员能够设计新功能，修复程序中的错误，并根据自己的需求定制软件。在互联网环境中从事这种软件生产方法的吸引力导致了专门的在线虚拟社区的出现和发展，其成员在执行其专业任务时遵循相当明确的既定程序，但在其他方面则由松散的结社规则约束在一起。这个项目探讨了这些组织的可持续性，以及它们的生存领域的可能范围--就可能以这种方式可靠地提供的商品和服务的种类而言。 调查有三个更接近的实证目标。第一，确定这些社区非正式组织结构演变的典型模式及其行为规范。程序权威的发展，以及解决个人之间关于其工作实质的冲突的其他手段，以及核实和确认他们的贡献，是特别研究的主题。第二个目标是描述这些社区内努力投入的分配及其与内部“奖励”的结构和分配的关系，以及不同参与水平的外部收益。 这些任务将通过分析被动收集的数据，参与者对电子邮件调查问卷的答复，以及特定社区的深入案例历史来完成。第三个也是更大的目标是了解这些“虚拟社区”的动态，以及它们与涉及空间分布的学术（“开放科学”）研究人员的合作组织相比所表现出的相似性和差异性，这些研究人员的工作是由计算机介导的电信实现的

Open source software relies on the expertise of developers around the world, who volunteer to produce software collaboratively. Their mode of collaboration requires participants to share the results of their work freely with others. By revealing the source code of the programs on which they work, developers participating in these collaborations are able to design new features, fix bugs in programs, and tailor the software to suit their own needs. The attractiveness of engaging in this method of producing software in the Internet environment has led to the emergence and growth of specialized, online virtual communities whose members follow rather clearly established procedures in performing their professional tasks, but are otherwise bound together by loose rules of association. This project inquires into the sustainability of such organizations, and the likely extent of their domain of viability-in terms of the kinds of goods and services that might reliably be supplied in this way. The investigation has three more proximate empirical objectives. The first is to identify typical patterns in the evolution of these communities' informal organizational structures and their norms of conduct. The development of procedural authority, and other means of resolving conflicts among individuals in regard to the substance of their work, and of verifying and validating their contributions, are subjects for special study. The second objective is to characterize the distribution of effort input within these communities and its relationship to the structure and distribution of internal "rewards," and derived external benefits for different levels of participation. These tasks will be approached through analysis of passively collected data, participant responses to email survey questionnaires, and in-depth case histories of particular communities. A third and larger goal is to understand the dynamics of these "virtual communities" and the similarities and differences they exhibit in comparisons with collaborative organizations involving spatially distributed academic ("open science") researchers whose work is enabled by computer-mediated telecommunications