Open Source Software Communities

Description

Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva:

"While crowdsourcing and open innovation are initiated by companies other forms of Internet-based innovation can be completely initiated and carried out by users.

One of the earlier phenomena of user-initiated Internet-based innovation is open source software communities. They emerged in the late 80s, but spread more intensively after the broad diffusion of Internet. According to (von Hippel and von Krogh, 2009), “Open source software is software that is made freely available to all. Open source software development projects are Internet-based communities of software developers who voluntarily collaborate to develop software that they or their organizations need … Well-known examples of open source software having many users are the GNU/Linux computer operating systems, Apache server software and the Perl programming language.”

The characteristics of open source software communities can be summarized as follows (see also von Hippel & von Krogh 2009):

· They are initiated by one or several users that need certain software for intellectual, personal or business reasons. Thus, open source software communities have no connections to companies.

· The users participate voluntarily and for free in the software development process.

· The functioning of open source software communities is enabled by online platforms providing specific functionalities for cooperative development of software.

· During their existence, open source software development communities create certain organizational and communication structures that enable an efficient and successful coordination of all development activities as well as management of the various software releases.

· The final product is a specific software that can be further developed and used for free not only by members of the development community, but also by any user and company." (http://berlinsymposium.org/sites/berlinsymposium.org/files/crowdsourcingenabledinnovation.pdf)