A Survey on Firms’ Participation in Open Source Community Projects

The role of firms in commercial Open Source projects (e.g., former MySQL, EnterpriseDB, SugarCRM) is a consolidated and generally accepted fact. On other hand, community Open Source projects, which are built upon communities and not directly associated with firms, are commonly perceived to be based mainly on the work of volunteers. Up to now, firms’ role in these projects has been poorly investigated. We conducted a survey on 1,302 SourceForge.net projects to inquire about the level and the typology of involvement of firms. We propose three different models for firm participation and provide empirical evidence on their diffusion in SourceForge.net.