Lessons Learned from Applying Social Network Analysis on an Industrial Free/Libre/Open Source Software Ecosystem

摘要

Many software projects are no longer done in-house by a single organization.Instead, we are in a new age where software is developed by a networkedcommunity of individuals and organizations, which base their relations to eachother on mutual interest. Paradoxically, recent research suggests that softwaredevelopment can actually be jointly-developed by rival firms. For instance, itis known that the mobile-device makers Apple and Samsung kept collaborating inopen source projects while running expensive patent wars in the court. Taking acase study approach, we explore how rival firms collaborate in the open sourcearena by employing a multi-method approach that combines qualitative analysisof archival data (QA) with mining software repositories (MSR) and SocialNetwork Analysis (SNA). While exploring collaborative processes within theOpenStack ecosystem, our research contributes to Software Engineering researchby exploring the role of groups, sub-communities and business models within ahigh-networked open source ecosystem. Surprising results point out thatcompetition for the same revenue model (i.e., operating conflicting businessmodels) does not necessary affect collaboration within the ecosystem. Moreover,while detecting the different sub-communities of the OpenStack community, wefound out that the expected social tendency of developers to work withdevelopers from same firm (i.e., homophily) did not hold within the OpenStackecosystem. Furthermore, while addressing a novel, complex and unexplored opensource case, this research also contributes to the management literature incoopetition strategy and high-tech entrepreneurship with a rich description onhow heterogeneous actors within a high-networked ecosystem (involvingindividuals, startups, established firms and public organizations)joint-develop a complex infrastructure for big-data in the open source arena.