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Rivalry and Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The WebKit Case

Jose Teixeira, Rivalry and Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The WebKit Case. In: Russell Bernard Bernard, Christopher McCarty, John Skvoretz (Eds.), Program Sunbelt XXXIV, 13, INSNA, 2014.

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{inpTeixeira_Jose14f,
  title = {Rivalry and Collaboration in the Open-Source Arena: The WebKit Case},
  booktitle = {Program Sunbelt XXXIV},
  author = {Teixeira, Jose},
  editor = {Bernard, Russell Bernard and McCarty, Christopher and Skvoretz, John},
  publisher = {INSNA},
  pages = {13},
  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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