The Organizational Model for Open Source

HBS Working Knowledge: Technology: "A surprising entity has emerged to protect the interests of open source software developers: the non-profit foundation. HBS professor Siobhán O'Mahony discusses this emerging organizational model.

Programmers contribute to free software and open source projects for many reasons—some for the fun of it, some to improve their skills, others for a paycheck. Many people have wondered why these people give their work away. The truth is that many projects have incorporated in order to protect themselves from individual liability. Since the Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985, a number of new nonprofit foundations have formed, often around specific technologies, to serve the interests of programmers.

HBS professor Siobhán O'Mahony discusses her research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, a complete non-commercial distribution of Linux; the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME), which is a graphical user interface for Linux-based operating systems; and Apache, a public domain open source Web server.

There are three big challenges. One, which is common to all start-ups, is resources. Many foundations have been successful in garnering donations of hardware and equipment when needed, but do not have vast reserves to support legal expenses, travel, or conferences. However, since these foundations are primarily electronically constituted and manifested in the physical world only by a mailing address, their capital needs are minimal.

Second is the tension between embracing the informal work norms and ethos of the hacker style of programming with the need to be more predictable and coordinated in managing software releases. Projects that are more closely coupled with commercial firms have experienced direct pressure from firms to communicate better and do more formal planning of what will be included in a release and when. Several projects that have created foundations are experimenting with this tension now—"How much structure can we impose on volunteers?" People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source projects possible.

Lastly, open source software foundations have been thrilled to receive support from Fortune 500 firms in the software industry. This support is attenuated by the fact that no community-managed software project wants to be "taken over" or co-opted by one firm. The biggest tension here is how to sustain pluralism. If open source contributors only recognize each other based on individual merit, to the exclusion of monitoring where those people of merit are employed, then the pluralism necessary to maintain a community form could be threatened.

One of the most important roles foundations can play is to ensure that pluralism in the governance of these projects is sustained.

People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source projects possible.

The more fundamental question that firms and policy makers need to be thinking about is just what type of good is software?"