Study: The role of firm employees' participation for the success of firm-initiated open source projects
In this repository provides all written (latex) texts, scripts and R code which was used for the study. The repository is not complete, yet.
The submitted version is available for download (PDF) (Updated: 30th March 2016).
You need latex (with PdfLaTeX and Bib(la)tex) to build the PDF from source. I recommend to use texstudio or texmaker for easier handling.
To analyze data with R, you need to clone the empirical data from an (external) repository into the projects' working directory. For example:
$ git clone git@github.com:pstaender/mastersthesis.git mastersthesis
$ cd mastersthesis
$ git clone https://git.zeitpulse.com/philipp/masterthesis-data.git dataOpen source software (OSS) is gaining more and more importance as innovation factor in software businesses. Also the number of firms who initiated open source projects has increased quite substantially over time. Therefore OSS has reached increasing attention by scholars in fields of organization and open innovation over the last two decades.
There are various popular examples of open source projects which demonstrate the feasibility of running a business with or on open source projects. Google, Twitter, facebook and Microsoft are just some well known firms who initiated open source projects with remarkable success. Of course not only big companies are actively developing OSS. There are also a variety of small and medium-sized enterprises that have successfully initiated and run open source projects, where some of them are part of their core business.
Open source communities are technical communities and can help firms to develop and deploy new technical innovations. So firms have a reason to collaborate with open source communities. Nonetheless firms that are involved in open source projects have to face various difficulties. One important point is that firms have to care about their relationship to the open source community and have to find a fair way to join commercial (of the firm) and non-commercial interests (of the open source community) without reducing the efficiency and the quality of innovation. Because of that symbiotic relation between the firm and the open source community organizational obstacles have to be solved by a firm if it wants to collaborate with open source communities.
This leads to the question to what extent affects a firm's internal resources on external resources.
The master thesis will describe and try to explain the participation and interaction of firm employed and external developers. Therefore project ranking and contribution ratios of several firms and their open source projects will be observed and analyzed.