The Dynamics of Open Source Contributors

Traditional innovative efforts result in intellectualproperty and results that are controlled by private firms. In contrast,open-source projects yield data that is available for public use with certainrestrictions. Individuals and for-profit firms who contribute to open-sourceprojects must make their improvements to the original project known andavailable to the public. This research investigates the impact of offerings to open source softwareprojects. A literature review discusses issues regarding contributions tosoftware, as well as the economic motivations behind open-source contributions.A panel data set, consisting of approximately 100 open source projects, wascompiled from information garnered from SourceForge, press searches, andproject websites. The number of different references to each individual involved in eachrespective project was tabulated. Individual contributors were furtherdifferentiated into five categories, based upon whether their contribution wasdone on their own behalf or as a function of their employment.Determinedby their email addresses, the contributor's categories included corporateemployees, individual hobbyists, unidentified international contributors,non-profit employees, and technical website contributors. The researchers indicate that this study acts as an initial examination ofthe time series patterns of open source contributions, with the resultsindicating that the distribution of corporate contributions tends to be moresubstantialin large, growing projects. (AKP)