Transition of governance in a mature open software source community: Evidence from the Debian case

Bert Sadowski, Gaby Sadowski-Rasters and Geert Duysters ()

Information Economics and Policy, 2008, vol. 20, issue 4, 323-332

Abstract: As open source software (OSS) communities mature, they have to introduce a variety of governance mechanisms to manage the participation of their members and to coordinate the launch of new releases. The Debian community introduced new mechanisms of informal administrative control based on a constitution, elected leaders, and used interactive communication channels. We show that these control mechanisms were introduced as a response to emerging innovative opportunities due to the usage of source packages and to the need to build a responsive organization within the Debian OSS community.

Keywords: Open; source; software; community; Governance; Debian (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: Transition of Governance in a Mature Open Software Source Community: Evidence from the Debian Case (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iepoli:v:20:y:2008:i:4:p:323-332

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