Understanding Open Source Software Development

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This project examines the dynamics of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, a genuine behavioral and technical puzzle with a far-reaching impact on the world's economy. The OSS community has developed a substantial portion of the infrastructure of the internet and has many outstanding technical achievements, without the benefit of traditional project management techniques, organizational structure, face to face interaction, and in most cases, without direct monetary compensation. We seek to understand the factors that predict developer retention and project success, and to model the growth of the OSS network over time in order to inform policy decisions regarding the OSS movement. We develop an organizational behavior/social psychological model of developer motivation and project effectiveness using a modification of Hackman & Oldham's job characteristics model and March's role identity construct, and use simulation, data mining, and agent-based modeling techniques to model how the OSS network develops over time.