Migrating a Development Project to Open Source Software Development

The CommSy-system is a web-based community system, which has been in development since 1999 at the University of Hamburg. It has initially been developed by students and researchers in their spare time. Its last organizational setting was a publicly funded research project, which allowed for full-time and part-time developers. As that project has come to an end, we are aiming at an open source project to ensure continuity by providing a frame for people from different organizations. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of this specific project and of other open source projects to identify a strategy for migrating that particular project to open source. We outline the actions taken to migrate the existing project to open source software development and raise questions concerning the necessary characteristics of an open source project as well as whether the actions will suffice or not.