Understanding Change in Open Source Communities: A Co-evolutionary Framework
Aron Lindberg · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2013
Open Source Software Development (OSSD) is becoming increasingly relevant both technically and commercially. Therefore, it is vital for both research and practice to understand why and how OSSD projects evolve over time. However, beyond explaining growth in size of codebases and communities, the literature reveals little about evolution in OSSD processes and community’s structural characteristics. In this study, we analyze two dimensions of OSSD evolution and their interdependencies: coding practices and community structures. By adopting an evolutionary perspective, our study seeks to shed light on why and how communities grow. Thoroughly understanding these dynamics will help scholars and practitioners manage OSSD projects so as to maximize community growth. We illustrate our approach through a case study of a medium-size OSSD project implementing an interpreter for a popular web development language. We find that evolutionary rates and changes in the entropy of coding practices are correlated with changes in the developer community. Our primary contribution is to formulate a novel theoretical framework to better explain the mutually shaping and co-evolving nature of OSS coding practice and communities.