Company Participation in Open Source Software Communities: Measuring Sustainability (Track 3, Session 1)
Author(s) :
Niklas Vainio (University of Tampere, Finland)
Ville Oksanen (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland)
Tere Vad�n (University of Tampere, Finland)
Abstract : The article presents a framework for analyzing the sustainability of a community in four dimensions - social, cultural, legal and economical. The social dimension means the structures of interpersonal communication, division of labor, etc., which vary according to the individuals participating, the size and age of the community, and so on. By cultural sustainability we mean the established generation-to-generation modes of behavior that a community establishes either explicitly or implicitly. Cultural sustainability also needs a more or less stable embedding of the community in the larger society. Legal sustainability concerns the issues of copyrights, patents and other legislation that a community inevitably faces. Different policies can be used in order to avoid fatal legal obstacles. Finally, economical sustainability is different with regard to the classical volunteer-based communities and the emerging salary-based open source communities; the issue of sustainability is most interesting in the case of hybrid communities where the two co-exist. We feel that these dimensions are needed in order to take into account the fact that open software communities are increasingly complex, containing both commercial and non-commercial actors with different motivations, values and goals. Consequently, in addition to the sustainability framework, we present a typology of open source software communities, where the age, size and license policy of a community is cross-referenced with regard to the type of work ethic: volunteer-based or salary-based. In conclusion, the framework is tentatively applied to two different kinds of communities, Debian and Eclipse.

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