Economic Organization, Performance and Viability of Open Source/Free Software Development

自由和开源软件（F/OSS）的生产模式是创新劳动分工的新范式。它可能不仅在软件系统产品领域产生变革性的经济影响，而且最终在更广泛的信息产品和服务领域找到重要的应用。为了调查这些可能性，我们需要首先理解“开源的工作方式”：F/OSS项目如何调动资源，分配专业知识，并保留那些在没有直接补偿的情况下贡献了大量工作的开发人员的承诺？不同类别的项目在它们的相对生产力表现方面是如何变化的，以及F/OSS的生产力与传统商业软件公司的生产力是如何比较的？这些自组织工作的产品能够满足其他软件用户的长期需求，而不是简单地为开发人员自己提供各种满足（包括定制的、可靠的代码）吗？这个由多个团队组成的研究项目正在通过一个综合研究项目来寻求这些基本经济问题的答案，该项目分析了F/OSS开发人员的微观调查信息、作者分布和通过计算机自动化方法从源代码本身提取的代码结构数据，以及项目内部和项目之间资源分配动态的基于代理的随机模拟建模。

The free and open source software (F/OSS) mode of production is a new paradigm in the division of innovative labor. It may have transformative economic impacts not only in the sphere of software system products, but eventually find important applications over a much broader range of information-goods and -services. To investigate those potentialities requires that we first understand "the open source way of working:" How do F/OSS projects mobilize resources, allocate expertise, and retain the commitment of developers who contribute their work largely without direct compensation? How do different classes of projects vary in terms of their relative productivity performances, and how does F/OSS productivity compare with that of conventional commercial software firms? How fully are the products of these self-organized efforts able meet the long-term needs of other software users, rather than simply providing satisfactions of various kinds (including custom-built, reliable code) for the developers themselves? This multi-team research project is pursuing answers to these basic economic questions in an integrated research program that analyzes micro-level survey information on F/OSS developers, authorship distributions and code-structure data extracted by computer-automated methods from the source code itself, and agent-based stochastic simulation modeling of the dynamics of resource allocation within and among projects.