[LIP] The social structure of FLOSS development

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/crowston/

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

BY KEVIN CROWSTON AND JAMES HOWISON

Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization 
of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary 
development by emphasizing FLOSS's distinctive social and communications 
structures. But what do we really know about the communication patterns of 
FLOSS projects? How generalizable are the projects that have been studied? Is 
there consistency across FLOSS projects? Questioning the assumption of 
distinctiveness is important because practitioner-advocates from within the 
FLOSS community rely on features of social structure to describe and account 
for some of the advantages of FLOSS production.

To address this question, we examined 120 project teams from SourceForge, 
representing a wide range of FLOSS project types, for their communications 
centralization as revealed in the interactions in the bug tracking system. We 
found that FLOSS development teams vary widely in their communications 
centralization, from projects completely centered on one developer to projects 
that are highly decentralized and exhibit a distributed pattern of conversation 
between developers and active users.

We suggest, therefore, that it is wrong to assume that FLOSS projects are 
distinguished by a particular social structure merely because they are FLOSS. 
Our findings suggest that FLOSS projects might have to work hard to achieve the 
expected development advantages which have been assumed to flow from "going 
open." In addition, the variation in communications structure across projects 
means that communications centralization is useful for comparisons between 
FLOSS teams. We found that larger FLOSS teams tend to have more decentralized 
communication patterns, a finding that suggests interesting avenues for further 
research examining, for example, the relationship between communications 
structure and code modularity.

Contents
Introduction
Understanding social structure
Social structure in practitioner-advocate literature
Social structure in academic studies of FLOSS
Our study
Data
Analysis and findings
The distribution of project centralization measures
Relationship between project centralization and project size
Conclusions

Full text at above URL...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha (FN)                    Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist                      P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.net                       http://fn-floss.notlong.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle


-------------------------------------------------------
SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click