Does Superposition Influence the Success of FLOSS Projects? An Examination of Open-Source Software Development by Organizations and Individuals

Abstract

Does the task work orchestration in free (Libre) and open-source (FLOSS) software projects influence the project’s success? Does satisfying the psychological needs of the contributors effectively scale up to the level of the project and manifest as project success? For answers, we developed an innovative approach to operationalize and study the degree to which a project’s task work consisted of sequential layering of individually developed tasks, referred to as "superposed organization of tasks." Using this measure on a large sample of FLOSS projects hosted on GitHub, we found that the degree of superposition exhibited an inverted U-shaped relationship with project success, indicating the presence of an optimal value for the project’s work structures. Further, organizational ownership of projects introduced practices that tended to influence the nature of this relationship. The greater the organization owner was willing to invest in the project by contributing code and employees’ time, the lesser was the overall influence of superposed work structures on the success of the project. The greater the organization owner invested in the support activities of the FLOSS project, greater was the time-cost of money—creating a higher need for efficient development practices in lieu of superposition.