Earlier this month, we started processing/summarizing a number of research papers that relate findings about the concrete governance of free software production.
As a reminder, we covered:
– The governance of sponsored open source projects and their communities
– Decision Rights in Open Source
– Protective mechanisms in the peer governance of open source communities
Today, we cover the following research paper:
Relationships between open source software companies and communities: Observations from Nordic firms. By Linus Dahlander, Mats G. Magnusson. Research Policy 34 (2005) 481–493
If you want to read more extensive excerpts, go to our wiki page, here are the research questions and the conclusions.
The value of this research papers is that it gives a clear typology of possible relationships, the managerial issues that it poses, and how four Nordic firms have developed distinctive governance responses to engage and retain community engagement.
1. The Research Questions
Linus Dahlander, Mats G. Magnusson:
“In firms, the relationships between developers and their employers are regulated by contracts. Consequently, these developers employed by firms receive salary and other types of financial compensation. In OSS projects, anyone is free to join and the relations are informal. Whereas firm-based software creation is normally restricted to relations within the firm, OSS developers are not bound to firms but are dispersed in all parts of the world.
The use of communities created or induced by management appears to be a balancing act, where the influence from the firm’s side, in terms of the degree of control and the strategic direction that is imposed, is a key issue. With too much control it is questionable whether it will be possible to generate the energy, interest and creativity that is at the core of “naturally” emerged communities.With too little control and direction, however, the effects for the firm may be small, or even counterproductive, in case the community’s goals work against the organization. This ought to be even more pronounced in the case of OSS, as management of the firm has no formal influence over the community based on their standing in the firm, and the overall value of openness and sharing prevalent within OSS is apparently conflicting with the firms’ ambitions to generate profit.
This apparent management challenge has directed our study to a number of research questions focusing on the inter-relationship between the firms and the communities, the first one of which is as follows:
Research question 1: What different approaches exist to handle OSS firm–community relationships?
The inter-relationship between OSS firms and communities seems to comprise a set of tensions and inconsistencies in terms of goals, norms and values, potentially leading to different managerial issues. This leads us to the second research question.
Research question 2: What managerial challenges do OSS firms encounter in their community-related activities?”
Finally,we address theway that OSS firms deal with their communities, at an operational level.
Thus, we pose the third research question.
Research question 3: What operational means do OSS firms use in order to handle their relationships to communities?
2. The Conclusions
“The above suggests that OSS firms can use symbiotic, commensalistic, or parasitic approaches for inter-relating to their communities. By using a more symbiotic approach, firms have more possibilities to influence the community. However, a symbiotic approach implies the acceptance of dual roles, and the key issue becomes how to balance a distributed knowledge system incorporating both the firm and its community, also acknowledging that the modes of control available differ widely within this system. These firms have much larger possibilities to use various operational means of enforcing subtle control.
Yet, this is not an easy task, as several managerial issues emerge: (1) respecting the norms and values of the OSS communities; (2) using licenses in a suitable way; (3) attracting developers and users; (4) dealing with the resource consumption involved in community development; (5) aligning different interests about the nature of work; and (6) resolving ambiguity about control and ownership.
The commensalistic approach, principally trying to utilize existing communities without inflicting any harm, may at a first glance appear to be easier to handle, but nevertheless holds a number of potential problems. Firms that are not involved to the same extent mainly face the problem of getting acceptance for using the community-developed software in their business activities and avoiding direct conflicts, but have very limited possibilities of influencing the community. Consequently, firms choosing a commensalistic approach will have to develop a capacity to adapt their strategies not only to provide what the customerswant, but also to a significant extent to the development taking place in the communities outside the firm. By not being actively involved in community development, it may be significantly harder to get acceptance for the firms’ commercial use of the communal resources. Hence, there is a greater risk of being perceived as parasitic, leading to the possible deterioration of the relationship.
This typology of approaches to relationships and the underlying managerial issues and operational means of subtle control also have the possibility of explaining the change from one approach to another. It shows that a greater possibility of influencing might result in several benefits, but it also results in a number of managerial issues that we have outlined.
The relationships between firms and communities voluntarily sharing their innovations also have policy implications. The communities analyzed here have evolved due to firm initiation and organizing among peers. People working within the communities voluntarily share their innovations with others, and their achievements are not protected by intellectual property rights (Waguespack and Fleming, 2004). Our observations indicate that firms may also benefit from this, through creating and maintaining relationships with these communities.
The ‘truth’ of intellectual property rights as the answer for spurring economic growth should be taken with great care. The debate in recent years to patent algorithms and business methods related to software has resulted in a heavy debate within Europe, as they discuss the benefits and drawbacks of increasing the possibility to use software patents. It has been noted that strong appropriability regimes may benefit individual firms, but slow the general cumulative advance (Levin et al., 1987). Our paper illustrates that through creating relations with communities firms can create economic impact, which illustrates that firms may benefit from the general advance in communities evolving at a rapid pace. An example of this is the case of MySQL. The firm has in a few years grown to become a major alternative to great software incumbents with millions of installations worldwide. The entire system of activities also includes actors with radically different goals and rationales for existing, and the inherent tensions in this set-up call for new ways of thinking about what a firm should do.”