Contributing to OS Projects. A Comparison between Individual and Firms

This paper studies the contributions software firms make to Open Source (OS) projects. Our goal is to ascertain whether they follow the same regularity of pattern seen for individual programmer An exhaustive empirical analysis was carried out using data on project membership1 , project coordination and the contributions made by 146 Italian firms that do business with OS software. We compare our findings with the results of the surveys taken on OS programmers. The availability of the data gathered by Hertel et al. ([10]) on 141 developers of the Linux kernel allowed a direct comparison to be carried out between the two sets2 .