Dynamics of communities and code in open source software
Markus Michael Geipel · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2009
The term Open Source implies that the source code, defining the software, is open.This means that everyone possesses the right to read the code, modify it, copy it, compile and use it free of charge.From an economic perspective this seems paradoxal: A complicated information good is produced without direct monetary compensation.And yet, Open Source software became a multi-million dollar business, with numerous highly successful applications.The counterintuitive success of Open Source software as well as its distributed and open organization spawned considerable research interest across diverse scientific disciplines.Yet, interdisciplinary research is still scarce.Moreover, a majority of the work is either case study based or theoretic.Quantitative analyses are rare.In this thesis, existing work is thus complemented in two ways: First, the research is based on an extensive database which allows for large-scale quantitative analyses.Second, to process this data, methods and knowledge originating from different disciplines are employed: physics of complex systems, computer science and economics & management.