PhD Thesis: Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects. Evangelia Berdou.

Glyn Moody introduces an important research project:

“As open source becomes more widely used, people have started exploring how and why its approach to developing software works so well. The pioneering analysis here is Eric Raymond’s Cathedral and the Bazaar, but that was largely describing a prelapsarian world of free software with little commercialisation. An intriguing question is how the bazaar functions in the corrupting presence of serious dosh.

That, in part, is what a PhD thesis from Evangelia Berdou seeks to answer. Its full title is “Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects.” The “mature” projects refer to GNOME and KDE, which is another reason to take a look: hitherto, people have tended to concentrate on GNU/Linux when analysing free software. Given that GNOME and KDE are both very different projects, and represent a later generation of free software, it’s useful to have more data on them.

The thesis packed with lots of interesting figures, diagrams, tables and charts, mostly drawing on extensive interviews with people within the GNOME and KDE worlds. It turns out that many more coders in GNOME are paid to work on the project compared to KDE.”