Alone or Together? Inter-organizational affiliations of open source communities

Abstract

Many of today's open source software (OSS) communities operate beneath an umbrella organization, while others are organized entirely independently, and yet others follow a strategy somewhere in between, sharing certain resources and services. In our paper, we analyze four mature OSS communities (GENIVI, PolarSys, LibreOffice and PostgreSQL) representing different organizational forms. Our qualitative case studies illustrate that OSS communities preferring to control all of their resources are organized autonomously, while those focused mainly on software development are integrated into an umbrella organization. An interjacent strategy is pursued by OSS communities affiliated with an intermediary form of organization that takes care of legal and financial issues, without prescribing organizational structures or a specific license. The findings of our case studies show that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for OSS communities and each strategy has specific advantages and disadvantages. Arguing with the theoretical concepts of Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) and Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), we are able to relate the findings of our qualitative empirical study to theoretical concepts explaining different organizational behavior. Therefore, this study contributes new insights concerning the inter-organizational affiliations of OSS communities thus responding to the question why different forms of OSS community governance exist.