The Impact of Project Initiators on Open Source Software Project Success

This paper focuses on studying the role of open source software project initiator in affecting the OSS project success from the perspective of individual and collective behaviors. The authors collected the data from an emerging OSS hosting platform Gitee in China. This research indicates that the success mode for open source software projects in China relies a lot on the project initiators. Project initiators not only contribute codes to aid the project directly, but also use their social capital to facilitate the project success. But no full play has been given to social network's effect on mass production and collaborative innovation. The authors suggest collaborative innovation which could lead to coherence of global collective wisdom, reduced development costs, and expanded source of innovation should be the further direction for the OSS project in emerging platforms.

The Impact of Project Initiators on Open Source Software Project Success

This paper focuses on studying the role of open source software project initiator in affecting the OSS project success from the perspective of individual and collective behaviors. The authors collected the data from an emerging OSS hosting platform Gitee in China. This research indicates that the success mode for open source software projects in China relies a lot on the project initiators. Project initiators not only contribute codes to aid the project directly, but also use their social capital to facilitate the project success. But no full play has been given to social network's effect on mass production and collaborative innovation. The authors suggest collaborative innovation which could lead to coherence of global collective wisdom, reduced development costs, and expanded source of innovation should be the further direction for the OSS project in emerging platforms.

What Is Needed for the Sustainable Success of OSS Projects: Efficiency Analysis of Commit Production Process via Git

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relative efficiency of open source software projects, and to analyze what is needed for their sustainable success. The success of open source software is known to be attributable to a massive number of contributors engaging in the development process. However, an efficient open source software project is not guaranteed simply by active participation by many; a coordination mechanism is needed to seamlessly manage the multi-party collaboration. On this basis, this study aimed to examine the internal regulatory processes based on Git and GitHub, which serve as such a mechanism, and redefine the efficiency of open source software projects to fully reflect them. For this purpose, a two-stage data envelopment analysis was used to measure the project efficiency reflecting the internal processes. Moreover, this study considered the Kruskal–Wallis test and Tobit regression analysis to examine the effects of the participation by many on an open source software project based on the newly defined efficiency. Results show that a simple increase in contributors can be poisonous in terms of the efficiency of open source software projects.