OSS systems, communities and innovations: emerging paradigm for development

Open source (OS) has emerged as a successful and reliable model that promotes community-based collaborative approach of innovations. Open source software (OSS) development is the most celebrated manifestation of OS approach. In the last two decades, the OS communities have delivered some extremely successful software products (Linux, Apache, MySQL, etc.) with surprisingly superior quality. The success of every OSS project depends on the size, structure and composition of the community evolved around it. Therefore, to embrace OSS development, it is necessary to understand how the systems evolve and the communities are formed in this community-based 'natural product development' process. This paper attempts to study the phenomenon of the evolution of OSS communities around an OSS project, the roles and actors involved in a typical OSS community by referring to four OSS projects [taken from Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), Japan survey project (Nakakoji et al., 2002)]. The paper also observes how OS approach promotes innovation activities and what makes such innovations special and sustainable. Overall the paper concludes that collaborative and natural process of community-based development of OS approach promotes creativity and helps translate ideas into innovations.