Design Rules Volume 2 : Chapter 25—Open Source and Corporations

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate a hybrid organizational form—open source projects with substantial corporate support and staffing. I begin by asking why corporations would find it in their interest to use and modify open source code and why they might then contribute code back to the open source community (rather than free-riding). From a corporation’s point of view, open source code has two attractive properties. First, it is a way to reduce the cost of developing software by sharing the expense with other users. Second, as we saw in the case of Google and Android, supporting an open source platform is a way to disintermediate sponsors of a proprietary platform, while preventing fragmentation of the platform itself.After laying out the reasons for corporate involvement, I summarize the evidence on early corporate participation in open source projects. I then describe how IBM and other computer systems integrators decided to support the open source codebase Linux in the server operating system market. I trace the evolution of code contributions and signoffs to the Linux kernel project from 2000 (when Linux first gained corporate sponsorship) until 2018 (when 90% of new code was contributed by employees of corporations). I go on to discuss three types of corporate-supported open source projects—captive projects under the sponsorship of one corporation; corporate-centered projects such as those sponsored by the Linux Foundation; and contributor-centered projects such as those sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation.I close the chapter by describing the symbiotic relationship that exists today between open source projects and corporations. I present evidence showing that captive and hybrid projects now dominate classic projects staffed solely by volunteers. At the same time, smaller open source projects without corporate sponsorship struggle to survive