Do Open Projects "Break the Mirror"?: Re-conceptualization of Organizational Configurations in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Development
Eunyoung Moon · 2016
The mirroring hypothesis holds when products and the organizations that create them have structures that mirror each other, coordination will be reduced and projects will be more successful. Yet research suggests that free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects can be successful even when violating this principle, "breaking the mirror" when loosely-coupled FLOSS contributors develop tightly-coupled systems. This study investigates this idea through a multiple-case studies using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. This study contributes to a fine-grained perspective that considers organizational configurations in community-based FLOSS development as an aggregate of many work episodes, each of which produces work outcomes, and can have different organizational coupling from loosely-coupled to tightly-coupled. This study intends to make a contribution to software design research, open collaboration, and industry practitioners who are interested in adoption of the FLOSS approach in commercial software development projects.