[Air-l] 1 (more) new paper on opensource.mit.edu

[Karim R. Lakhani]

Hello Again,

Below are the details for a new submission.  Thanks to the authors for 
the submission.  As always, authors welcome feedback for the papers.

Authors:
Kieran Healy and Alan Schussman.

Title: The Ecology of Open Source Software Development
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/healyschussman.pdf

Abstract: A number of theories have emerged to explain the success of
open source software, mainly from economics and law. We analyze a very
large sample of OSS projects and find striking patterns in the overall
structure of the development community. The distribution of projects on
a range of activity measures is spectacularly skewed, with only a
relatively tiny number of projects showing evidence of the strong
collaborative activity which is supposed to characterize OSS. Our
findings are consistent with prior, smaller-scale empirical research. We
argue that these findings pose problems for the dominant accounts of
OSS. We suggest that the gulf between active and inactive projects may
be explained by social-structural features of the community which have
received little attention in the existing literature. We suggest some
hypotheses that might better predict the observed ecology of projects.

Thanks again!
-- 
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Karim R. Lakhani
MIT Sloan School of Management
MIT Free/Open Source Software Research Project
e-mail: lakhani at mit.edu
voice:  617-851-1224
fax:    617-344-0403
http://opensource.mit.edu
http://freesoftware.mit.edu
http://mit.edu/lakhani/www
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