Beyond Communitarian Cause : Resource Competition and Inter-Project Performance Variation in Open Source Movements

Beyond Communitarian Cause : Resource Competition and Inter-Project Performance Variation in Open Source Movements

  This study examines the sources of variation in the mobilization of participants in open source projects. In open source movements (OSM), programmers around the world voluntarily contribute their technological competencies to the collaborative development of free software without explicit expectation of economic return. To explain inter-project variation in the mobilization of participants, the current study focuses on the dynamics of resource competition in OSM projects, each requiring the scarce resources of technological competencies possessed by programmers. Based on the presumption that the performance of each project will be determined by the degree to which its technological niche is advantageous in resource attraction, the current study identifies three key dimensions of niches ？ resource popularity, resource standardization, and resource co-attachment ？ and tests their effects on the mobilization of participants. The results of the empirical analyses provide strong support for our framework. While resource popularity turned out to have an inverted U-shape relationship with the mobilization of participants, resource standardization was found to have a positive effect. On the other hand, resource co-attachment, the extent to which different technologies are attached to the same programmers, turned out to have a negative effect on the dependent variable.