A Preliminary Analysis of the Influences of Licensing and Organizational Sponsorship on Success in Open Source Projects

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2011-04-21 11:09

Title	A Preliminary Analysis of the Influences of Licensing and Organizational Sponsorship on Success in Open Source Projects
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2005
Authors	Stewart, KJ, Ammeter, AP, Maruping, LM
Secondary Title	Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 07
Pagination	1-10
Date Published	2005
Publisher	IEEE Computer Society
Place Published	Washington, DC, USA
ISBN Number	0-7695-2268-8-7
Keywords	contributors, developers, freshmeat, license analysis, licensing, metadata, popularity, restrictive, users
Abstract	This paper develops and tests a model of the impact of licensing restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship on the popularity and vitality of open source software (OSS) development projects. Using data gathered from Freshmeat.net and OSS project home pages the main conclusions derived from the analysis are that organizational sponsorship has a positive effect on project popularity by easing user concerns about cost and quality and that license restrictiveness may have a negative effect on popularity by reducing the perceived utility of open source software. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and the paper outlines several avenues for future research.
Notes	"Publicly available data on open source projects registered on the Freshmeat website (www.freshmeat.net) was used to test the hypotheses. Data was collected from each project’s Freshmeat website at the start and end of an eight month period (March - December 2002)." "We first selected three project categories from which to draw our sample. These were utilities, software development, and games." "Within these categories we further differentiated between new projects, which had been registered on the site within the two weeks prior to our first data collection point and older projects that had been registered more than two weeks prior to our initial data collection."
URL	http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2005.38
DOI	10.1109/HICSS.2005.38
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