The success of free and open source software projects: Multidimensional and contingency perspectives

Abstract

Free and open source software (FOSS) is a classification that started in 1989 when Richard Stallman created the free software foundation. The open nature of the code and the volunteer nature of the community that surrounds FOSS projects have made FOSS a significant economic, social and cultural phenomenon. Additionally, the success of some FOSS projects has attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners. Even with the great effort to identify factors that influence the success of FOSS projects, they still suffer from a high failure rate. Therefore, this study seeks to synthesis the FOSS literature to identify and test the factors that influence the outcome of a project. The first essay examines the effect of alignment between development process and software characteristics in free and open source software projects. The study develops the ideal profiles for software development process based on the level of risk attributed to the software characteristics of a project, and utilizes a profile deviation approach to examine the effect of alignment on the FOSS project performance. The results indicate that there is a significant negative relationship of project performance as the profile of a project deviates from the ideal profile. The findings suggest that the development process must be adapted to the project risk of a FOSS project. The second essay identifies factors crucial to the success of free and open source software projects and empirically tests those factors to a large dataset of FOSS projects. By measuring success in different dimensions the study can identify the dimension of success that each factor affects. Market success had a positive relationship with the type of users, the amount of users collaborating as well as their involvement and the restrictiveness of the license used in the project, where technical success had a positive relationship with the modularity of the project, the amount of contributors to the code and the existenc...