Library and Information Science Commons^™

Coordination Of Free/Libre Open Source Software Development, Kevin Crowston, Kangning Wei, Qing Li, U Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The apparent success of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development projects such as Linux, Apache, and many others has raised the question, what lessons from FLOSS development can be transferred to mainstream software development? In this paper, we use coordination theory to analyze coordination mechanisms in FLOSS development and compare our analysis with existing literature on coordination in proprietary software development. We examined developer interaction data from three active and successful FLOSS projects and used content analysis to identify the coordination mechanisms used by the participants. We found that there were similarities between the FLOSS groups and the reported practices …