Collectivism, creativity, competition, and control in open source software development: reflections on the emergent governance of the SPDX ® working group

Abstract

For over a decade, we assumed that software developers had a choice between the cathedral and the bazaar: developers could choose to develop propriety software in a structural hierarchy of planned development, testing, and documentation or in a tumultuous and exciting, quick release open source marketplace. We are finding that these assumptions are no longer valid. Corporate members' participation in open source software development and greater attention to compliance with open source licenses has signalled the need for new metaphors for open source software design and development. In this study, we use participant observation and functional discourse analysis to determine which metaphors are useful and seek evidence for these metaphors in the emergent governance structure of the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX ®) working group, which is one of the important players in the future of open source development. We observed three governing structures for the SPDX working group: meritocracy, adhocracy, and family/republic and reflected back to the SPDX working group the need to pay greater attention to their governance structures to help in future strategic decisions. We conclude that open source developers now have a choice among collectivism, creativity, competition, and control. 126 M. Germonprez et al. (2014) 'Collectivism, creativity, competition, and control in open source software development: reflections on the emergent governance of the SPDX ® working group', Int.