Three Essays of Governance on Open Source Software Project: -Individual, Project, and Organization Perspectives

Abstract

To foster innovation, many companies have been investing resources both outside and within companies. The recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) have also led various companies enhance their innovation performance through open collaborations that lead to similar and sometimes better than innovations developed by internal resources. In this study, factors affecting the innovation performance of open-source software (OSS) as a representative example of open collaboration are studied. Although OSS is developed by many, unspecified volunteers, its final goal is to develop software with intended functions. Therefore, governance mechanisms of OSS can affect the results of software development projects. A three-level analysis on the governance of OSS development project was conducted in this study. First, in Essay 1, when individual developers establish and manage an open-source project, they become its owner. We assumed that the role owners can affect project performance. In addition, when developers form an organization to manage and develop projects, governance styles to operate the project will differ according to organizations. Therefore, organizational characteristics on innovation performance are the research objectives of Essay 2 in this paper. Finally, in Essay 3, the effects of inherent project characteristics on project innovation performance are also examined focusing on team compositions. For the three-point analysis, this study collected data by web crawling on GitHub (Github.com), which is the OSS development platform. The results of this study suggest directions for successful governance of OSS project, and provide theoretical contribution to the existing study as streams of innovation management.