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Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The WebKit Case

José Teixeira, Tingting Lin, Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The WebKit Case. In: Damien Joseph, Conrad Shayo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 52nd ACM conference on Computers and people research, 121–129, ACM, 2014.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2599990.2600009

Abstract:

In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards distributed software development teams is being challenged by emerging collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. In this paper, we explore the collaboration networks in the WebKit open-source project, by mining WebKit's source-code version-control-system data with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Our approach allows us to observe how key events in the mobile-device industry have affected the WebKit collaboration network over time. With our findings, we show the explanation power from network visualizations capturing the collaborative dynamics of a high-networked software project over time; and highlight the power of the open-source fork concept as a nexus enabling both features of competition and collaboration. We also reveal the WebKit project as a valuable research site manifesting the novel notion of open-coopetition, where rival firms collaborate with competitors in the open-source community.

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpTeLi14a,
  title = {Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The WebKit Case},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 52nd ACM conference on Computers and people research},
  author = {Teixeira, José and Lin, Tingting},
  editor = {Joseph, Damien and Shayo, Conrad},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pages = {121–129},
  year = {2014},
  keywords = {Free-software, open-source, distributed software development, software ecosystem, WebKit, coopetition, open-coopetition },
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): UTU Information Systems Science (ISS)

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