Performance Benefits from Free and Open Source Governance

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Excellent dissertation comparing open source team work behaviors versus commercial ones.

Performance Benefits from

Free and Open Source Governance

 

By uncovering varying pathways to team performance, this study identifies how free and open source practices can support team effectiveness.

 

This is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation. Please comment, question and suggest improvements:

 

Emerging research on work teams is demonstrating how team processes can increase organizational performance. The objective of this research is to determine whether free and open source (FOSS) communities differ substantially in team work behaviors from teams working in commercial environments. By uncovering varying pathways to team performance, this study identifies how free and open source and commercial practices can support team effectiveness.

 

During the last two decades free and open source software has emerged as a major alternative mechanism for coordinating distributed, large-scale software projects. With its roots in collegial academic computer science departments and the non-commercial hacker phenomenon, the FOSS movement emphasizes voluntarism and the sharing source code (Lerner & Tirole, 2002). Programmers working on an FOSS project serve as volunteers and choose the problems they will take on. Contributors to FOSS projects help to produce a public good, available for general use. Standing in contrast to commercial software companies, free and open source software provides a model that challenges transactional models of production (Brock, 2005).

 

FOSS projects facilitate voluntary collaboration guided by nonmonetary incentives. By eliminating the direct impact of loud monetary incentives, free and open source production leverages quieter, yet effective motivations including learning, reputation and altruism. The success of Linux, Apache, and Wikipedia demonstrates that these motivations can generate substantial marketplace acceptance.....

 

https://plus.google.com/+JasonHurtadoDaniels/posts/gCLES99Yusy

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