Standards and coordination in open source software

Abstract

Almost by definition, open source software (OSS) offers an incentive to elaborate and adapt source code. One would expect this in-built opportunity to diverge to lead to incompatible strains of software, and, consequently to a clamour for standardisation. However, this is only partly the case. Why? Which other coordinative mechanisms are at work apart from the standards initiatives? From standards literature we distil four categories of coordinative mechanisms, and illustrate their relevance with OSS examples. In the concluding section we re-address the complementary relation between the four categories and committee standardisation.