Contributing to the common pool resources in Open Source software. A comparison between individuals and firms

This paper studies the contributions to Open Source projects of software firms. Our goal is to analyse whether they follow the same regularities that characterize the behaviour of individual programmers. An exhaustive empirical analysis is carried out using data on project membership, project coordination and contribution efforts of 146 Italian firms that do business with Open Source software. We follow a meta-analytic approach comparing our findings with the results of the surveys conducted on Free Software programmers. Moreover, the availability of the data gathered by Hertel et al. (2003) on 141 developers of the Linux kernel will allow direct comparisons between the two sets.