Ideological shifts in open source orchestration: examining the influence of licence choice and organisational participation on open source project outcomes

Poonacha K. Medappa and Shirish C. Srivastava

European Journal of Information Systems, 2020, vol. 29, issue 5, 500-520

Abstract: Though volunteer-driven Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (FLOSS) development were founded on the ideological beliefs of “openness” and “absence of any commercial appropriation”, in recent years, FLOSS movement has witnessed two ideological shifts. First, the emergence of “permissive FLOSS licences” that allow commercial appropriation of the collaboratively developed code, and second, “organisational ownership” of FLOSS projects. Because ideological beliefs shape the motivational needs of the volunteer contributors, and motivational needs influence the dominant work structures, it is expected that ideological shifts could influence the mechanisms through which work is orchestrated in FLOSS projects. Motivated by the need to understand the impact of these ideological shifts, we theorise the mechanisms through which the two ideological shifts alter the influence of FLOSS work structures on project outcomes of popularity and survival. Adopting an instrument variable approach, our analysis of projects hosted on GitHub confirms the significance of both the ideological shifts with some interesting contextual differences across the two project outcomes. Specifically, we find that the ideological shift pertaining to licence type has a significant influence on both the examined project outcomes, whereas organisational ownership has a significant influence only on the popularity of FLOSS projects.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0960085X.2020.1756003 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:29:y:2020:i:5:p:500-520

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjis20

DOI: 10.1080/0960085X.2020.1756003

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Information Systems is currently edited by Par Agerfalk

More articles in European Journal of Information Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().