COORDINATION OF FREE/LIBRE OPEN SOURCE
Kevin Crowston, Kangning Wei, Qing Li, U. Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison · 2005
The apparent success of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development projects such as Linux, Apache, 12 and many others has raised the question, what lessons from FLOSS development can be transferred to main13 stream software development? In this paper, we use coordination theory to analyze coordination mechanisms 14 in FLOSS development and compare our analysis with existing literature on coordination in proprietary 15 software development. We examined developer interaction data from three active and successful FLOSS 16 projects and used content analysis to identify the coordination mechanisms used by the participants. We found 17 that there were similarities between the FLOSS groups and the reported practices of the proprietary project 18 in the coordination mechanisms used to manage task-task dependencies. However, we found clear differences 19 in the coordination mechanisms used to manage task-actor dependencies. While published descriptions of 20 proprietary software development involved an elaborate system to locate the developer who owned the relevant 21 piece of code, we found that “self-assignment” was the most common mechanism across three FLOSS projects. 22 This coordination mechanism is consistent with expectations for distributed and largely volunteer teams. We 23 conclude by discussing whether these emergent practices can be usefully transferred to mainstream practice 24 and indicating directions for future research. 25 26