7 new papers on opensource.mit.edu

Dear All,

Hope everyone is doing well in our community.  I am pleased to have 
posted the following 7 new papers to our website.  Our community now has 
over 200 working papers! Current count is at 207. Wow!  Many thanks to 
all the authors for their submissions and in keeping the community 
growing and vibrant.

Here is to an enjoyable spring/fall!

Warmly,


Karim


Paper 1
Author
Sandeep Krishnamurthy

Title
The Launching of Mozilla Firefox- A Case Study in Community-Led Marketing
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/sandeep2.pdf

Abstract:
Mozilla Firefox is a Free/Libre/Open Source (FLOSS) browser supported by 
the Mozilla Foundation. This browser was recently released and has met 
with considerable success- it has been downloaded more than 20 million 
times and has already taken considerable market share from its prime 
competitor- Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. In this paper, I chronicle 
how the efforts of 63000 volunteers led to a community successfully 
competing with a powerful corporation. I identify four factors as the 
key facilitators to Firefox’ success- complacent competition, product 
superiority, presence of marketing leader and volunteer support.

Paper 2
Author
Martin Michlmayr

Title
Managing Volunteer Activity in Free Software Projects
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/michlmayr-mia.pdf

Abstract
During the last few years, thousands of volunteers have created a
large body of free software. Even though this accomplishment shows
that the free software development model works, there are some
drawbacks associated with this model. Due to the volunteer nature of
most free software projects, it is impossible to fully rely on
participants. Volunteers may become busy and neglect their duties.
This may lead to a steady decrease of quality as work is not being
carried out. The problem of inactive volunteers is intensified by the
fact that most free software projects are distributed, which makes it
hard to quickly identify volunteers who neglect their duties. This
paper shows Debian's approach to inactive volunteers. Insights
presented here can be applied to other free software projects in order
to implement effective quality assurance strategies.

Paper 3
Author
Stefan Behringer

Title
The Provision of a Public Good with a direct Provision Technology and 
Large Number of Agents
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/behringer.pdf

Abstract
This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good
in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large.
A canonical example for a public good that is produced with a direct
provision technology is Open Source Software.


Paper 4
Author
Geroge Dafermos

Title
The critical delusion of the condition of digitisation
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/dafermos_ccc.pdf

Abstract
This essay analyses how digital media prosthetics, institutionalisation 
(in particular the manifestations of copyright and patent law which lurk 
behind vested interests in controlling the transition to a vastly more 
powerful new world), and the imperatives of corporate planning have come 
into a conflict so fierce that shared lived experience, increasingly, is 
forced to undergo a rapid process of commodification. This struggle,
which can no longer be defined through the lens of geography or class 
alone, in turn, points to a not too distant future in which 
commons-based peer production/consumption is exploited within the 
context of intense social taylorism and digital fordism with the
ultimate goal to turn culture into a paid-for experience, and hence 
moving the terrain of struggle away from the surplus value of labour to 
the legitimacy of knowledge sharing and pervasive networking, and how 
the latter can be monetised and controlled in accordance with 
anarcho-capitalist agendas. Obviously, the question which we ought to
pose to ourselves is how the revolutionary demands of hacking can be 
guided, assembled, and reproduced, so that this process of 
commodification is consciously resisted by technology developers and 
users alike, artists, and all those whose creativity and desire
for socially conscious technological innovation and emergent social 
co-operation have been enhanced by the digital condition we're 
increasingly in the centre of.


Paper 5
Authors
Cristina Rossi and Andrea Bonaccorsi

Title
Intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms in Open Source software. 
Do firms practise what they preach?
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/rossi_motivations.pdf

Abstract
A growing body of economic literature is exploring the incentives of the 
agents involved in the Open Source movement. However, most empirical 
analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do 
business with Open Source software (Open Source firms). This paper
contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the 
incentives of firms that engage in Open Source activities. Data on 
firms’ motivations were collected by a large-scale survey conducted on 
146 Italian companies supplying Open Source (OS) solutions and show
that intrinsic, community-based incentives do play a role. Nevertheless, 
these positive attitudes towards the values of the OS community, which 
are quite surprising by profit-oriented firms, are not in general put 
into practise. Discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours is a widely
investigated phenomenon in social psychology literature. We explore its 
pattern in our sample, find that it does not concern all the 
respondents, and single out a group of firms adopting a more consistent 
behaviour. Our results are in line with the literature on individual 
motivations in organisations and Open Source business models.


Paper 6
Author
Matthias Stürmer

Title:
Open Source Community Building
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/sturmer.pdf

Abstract
Building an active and helpful community around an open source project 
is a complex task for its leaders. Therefore investigations in this work 
are intended to define the optimum starting position of an open source 
project and to identify recommendable promoting actions by project 
leaders to enlarge community size in a healthy way. For this paper eight 
interviews with committed representatives of successful open source 
projects have led to over 12 hours of conversation about community 
building. Analysing the statements of these experienced community 
members exposed helpful activities that led to the presently prospering 
communities of their projects. Summarizing the conclusions of this 
qualitative research a table with conditions for successful open source 
project initialisation and a subject-level promotion matrix of community 
building could be created. They include suggestions o­n how to start a 
new open source project and how to improve and increase the community of 
an already advanced open source project.



Paper 7
Author
Norbert Bollow

Title:
Webservice Protocol Design for Economic Liberty and Observability
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/bollow.pdf

Abstract
One big potential benefit of the webservices paradigm is in reducing the 
costs of inter-firm business transactions. That should allow small and 
medium-sized enterprises to compete successfully with big firms. This 
paper considers specifically the economic needs of peer-to-peer business 
alliances, defined as multiparty business alliances which are not under 
the control of any single firm or any small group of alliance members, 
so that each participating firm has full economic liberty. This 
organisational form is appropriate for example for Free Software 
businesses. The main conclusions are that achieving economic 
observability of business transactions is of great importance, and that 
this is difficult to achieve with the Remote Procedure Calls paradigm of 
JINI or XML / HTTP / SOAP based webservices. The problem can be overcome 
by using the SXDF / QQP / QRPC suite of webservice protocols,