The Fragility of Open Source: A Case Study

Abstract

Open source software with its distinctive communities and unique history, lledwith ideology and politics, has for the past decade been of high interest to manyacademic elds. It is no wonder, when the communities consisting of volunteerscooperating and thereby creating these massive success histories, such as Apache,Linux and Mozilla.In this thesis open source software is viewed as fragile entities, as opposed to theheroic perspective that is dominating current research in the eld of open source.Methods for creating a sustainable community are investigated through a casestudy of two open source software projects. Data is collected from the publiclyavailable e-mail archives, bug trackers and observation through internet relay chat.Through analyzing the data gathered I have identied some fragile aspects of opensource software, as well as a few means of reducing fragility. I conclude that opensource developers can benet from acknowledging these points of fragility and anycompany looking into open source for should carefully assess the software with thisfragility in consideration.