The Impact of Project Initiators on Open Source Software Project Success

Abstract

This paper focuses on studying the role of open source software project initiator in affecting the OSS project success from the perspective of individual and collective behaviors. The authors collected the data from an emerging OSS hosting platform Gitee in China. This research indicates that the success mode for open source software projects in China relies a lot on the project initiators. Project initiators not only contribute codes to aid the project directly, but also use their social capital to facilitate the project success. But no full play has been given to social network's effect on mass production and collaborative innovation. The authors suggest collaborative innovation which could lead to coherence of global collective wisdom, reduced development costs, and expanded source of innovation should be the further direction for the OSS project in emerging platforms.