Sponsored Open Source Community

Definition

West and O’Mahony:

A sponsored open source community is one where one (or more) corporate entities control the community’s short- or long-term activities.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Discussion

The tension between control and Openness

West and O’Mahony:

“One key difference between autonomous (community managed) and sponsored open source software projects is that the sponsors of open source projects faced a fundamental tension between two conflicting goals. On the one hand, sponsoring an open source project was intended to advance the goals of the sponsoring organization. Sponsoring an open source project required significant investment in preparing the code, hosting the site, providing introductory materials and marketing the new opportunity. As such, community sponsors sought to maintain some degree of control over the project to assure ongoing alignment between their investment in the community and related product goals. On the other hand, the provision of source code under an open source license was an inherently open approach intended to win greater external participation and technological adoption. In some cases, sponsors sought adoption from prospective users (cf. West, 2003); in other cases, they sought adoption from producers of complementary products or even direct competitors.

We found that for the most open communities, the participation of external parties provided sponsors with both direct benefits (such as code contributions and bug reports from participants) and indirect benefits (such as marketing and adoption benefits from their open approach). For the most closed communities, sponsors thought that the primary benefit they received from creating an open source community was not from direct community contributions, but instead from increased public awareness, accelerated low cost distribution, and reduced costs of marketing.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Three distinct governance and policy choices govern the interaction with the community

West and O’Mahony:

“we found a fundamental tension unique to sponsored communities: while sponsors recognized that the key to attracting and retaining participants to their communities was to provide unfettered opportunities for contribution, they had an interest in retaining some controlling influence over the communities they founded to ensure these communities remained aligned with corporate strategy. Managing this tension was a pervasive concern and illuminates some of the challenge in using external communities to pursue open innovation. After identifying the tension between openness and control, we identified more precisely how sponsors reconciled this tension with 11 specific community building design parameters that cluster across three dimensions.

From our data, we found that the sponsor-founded communities could be classified into one of three distinct groups as sorted in Table 3.

The first group of firm-created communities either had achieved or were seeking levels of community participation comparable to those of individually-founded communities; in fact, two of the communities (Eclipse, Mozilla) transitioned from corporate sponsored to become independent autonomous communities.

At the other extreme, a second group of communities (the three firm-sponsored duallicensed communities) offered what we term a “fishbowl” development pattern — with the sponsor offering transparency to outsiders, but not accessibility to software development.

A third group of communities lay somewhere in between: experimenting with the provision of access but not willing to give up key points of control.

Strikingly, sponsors were far more likely to provide transparency than they were accessibility, despite the possibility that a more controlled governance structure offered fewer opportunities for leadership and could thus reduce the sponsor’s ability to recruit contributors. Community design decisions to provide either transparency and accessibility had very different effects. Transparency was cited by informants as critical to aiding adoption of the software: a key goal of all sponsors. The effects of accessibility were more mixed: while accessibility could potentially enhance the volume and quality of contributors to a project, it could also compromise sponsors’ control over production. For when development was made fully accessible to external parties, more parties to decision-making created new dependencies and coordination costs for software that was critical to firm product lines.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Source

Article: The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities. By Joel West (San Jose State University College of Business) and Siobhán O’Mahony (UC Davis Graduate School of Management) February 6, 2008 preprint version of Industry and Innovation, Special Issue on “Managing Open Innovation Through Online Communities”

URL = http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf

More Information

1. Autonomous Open Source Community