Public Goods Theory of the Open Source Development Community using Agent-based Simulation
Scott Christley, Jin S. Y. Xu · 2004
Creation of open source software (OSS) can be considered a collective action by individuals with the mutual self-interest of creating and maintaining a public good. We explain the OSS development process in terms of public goods theory including the notions of connectivity and communality for interactive communication systems; we add an additional feature which is the characteristics of the environment as it interacts with the OSS development community. OSS is more than a simple, classical, physical good; it is a complex, socially-constructed, informational good that has heterogeneous resource requirements and provides heterogeneous benefits to its users. Critical mass occurs not at a singular point in time but is ongoing adaptive process, and the notion of success for a project is dependent upon both the group's cognitive purpose of the software and each member's cognitive belief in the project's success. In this paper, we describe in detail the connection between the OSS development community and public goods theory, and we explore the hypothesis of open source software as a public good by using agent-based modeling and