고려대학교

초록/요약

The promise of collective intelligence emerging from voluntary participation, contribution and knowledge sharing brought about by ubiquitous information and communication technologies has recently attracted the attention of academics and practitioners alike. Of many related phenomena, open source software (OSS) development has been touted as one of the leading examples that speak to the potential of collective intelligence. In fact, much of today’s Internet infrastructure depends on OSS such as the Apache web server or the Linux operating system. However, such high-profile cases are unfortunately the exception rather than the norm – the vast majority of OSS projects fail to take off and are abandoned. Recently, the advent of novel open collaboration platforms for open source software development, such as Github, has prompted researchers to go beyond investigating OSS phenomena at the project level to understanding how the design of open collaboration platforms may impact the overall sustainability of open source software more broadly. For example, stark differences are shown with respect to overall rates of project initiation, distribution of open source projects, concentration of developer activities, and rates of project abandonment across open collaboration platforms such as Sourceforge and Github, two open platforms that offer different approaches to collaborative work. This paper builds on our past work investigating developer behaviors on Sourceforge and Github to derive insights into how the design and structure of open collaboration platforms may influence the broader sustainability of open source software development.