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Understanding Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The Cases of WebKit and OpenStack

Jose Teixeira, Understanding Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The Cases of WebKit and OpenStack. In: Martin Shepperd, Tracy Hall, Steve Counsell, Andrea Capiluppi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 52–57, ACM, 2014.

Abstract:

In an era of software crisis, the move of rms towards dis- tributed 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 our research we ex- plore collaboration networks in the WebKit and OpenStack open-source projects, by mining their source-code version- control-systems data with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Our approach allows us to observe how key events in the in- dustry a ect open-source collaboration networks over time. With our ndings, we highlight the explanation power from network visualizations capturing the collaborative dynam- ics of high-networked software projects over time. More- over, we depicted that competing companies that market similar products in the same market, can collaborate in the open-source community while publicly manifesting in- tense rivalry (e.g. Apple vs Samsung patent-wars). After integrating our ndings with the current body of theoreti- cal knowledge in management strategy, economics, strategic alliances and coopetition, we propose the novel notion of open-coopetition, where rival rms collaborate with com- petitors in the open-source community. We argue that clas- sical coopetition management theories do not fully explain the competitive and collaborative issues that are simultane- ously present and interconnected in the WebKit and Open- Stack open-source communities. We propose the develop- ment of the novel open-coopetition theory for a better un- derstanding on how rival- rms collaborate with competitors in an open-source fashion

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpTeixeira_Jose14d,
  title = {Understanding Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The Cases of WebKit and OpenStack},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering},
  author = {Teixeira, Jose},
  editor = {Shepperd, Martin and Hall, Tracy and Counsell, Steve and Capiluppi, Andrea},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pages = {52–57},
  year = {2014},
  keywords = {Open-Source, OSS, FLOSS, Strategic Alliances, Ecosystems, Collaboration, Competition, Coopetition, Open-Coopetition},
}

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

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