Thank you Karim!!!

Dear Community

I propose that every decade or so we all give a great vote of thanks to 
Karim Lakhani for being the spirit and energy that keeps the site running 
and the community fed with interesting new ideas!
Thank you Karim, Thank you Karim, Thank you Karim, Thank you Karim, Thank 
you Karim, Thank you Karim, Thank you Karim  :-)))



At 07:54 PM 3/15/2005 -0500, Karim R. Lakhani wrote:
>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,
>
>
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Eric von Hippel
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