Introduction to a roundtable on the governance of open source software: particular solutions and general lessons
P.B. de Laat · Journal of Management & Governance · 2007
In the spring of 2006, the editors of the JMG asked me to stage a roundtable discussion about the topic of governance of open source software (OSS).In a call for papers the theme was announced as follows.''Since the year 2000, the phenomenon of OSS is increasingly attracting scholarly attention.How do hackers succeed in governing a seemingly chaotic process of hundreds (if not thousands) of volunteers working together?How is this apparent self-governance to be explained?Throughout, it would seem to be important to differentiate the concept of governance into governance in a strict sense: steering the actual cooperation of volunteers, and governance in a broad sense: creating wider institutional conditions for the movement to flourish as a whole.The central question of this JMGdiscussion then becomes: what instruments are at play in open source governancein both a strict and a broad sense?''Thereupon, the following set of questions was posed to the participants in order to open up discussion:• Is the process of OSS production governed mainly by means of incentives, control, or trust?Or, more accurately, assuming that differences obtain between various OSS groups, what is the 'bandwidth' of incentives/control/trust actually in use for governing 'production' processes?And to what extent this balance has changed over time?• If in your opinion incentives play a role in self-governance of open source groups, can you explain how such governance looks like (e.g., reputation concerns)?