The sustainability of open source commons

Abstract

The sustainability of commons has benefited from Elinor Ostrom´s analysis of shared resources. In her work, sustainability was described in a univocal manner–successful or not–depending on the common’s long-term capacity to survive within an uncertain environment. In recent years, this view of sustainability has been applied to the study of digital commons, including open source. Building on more recent work on sustainability, this paper challenges this univocal conception of sustainability in open source. Through a critical review of the literature, it unveils the coexistence of multiple notions of sustainability in open source and proposes a typology of sustainabilities (resource-based, infrastructural, and interactional). We propose that the degree and quality of the interrelationship between these different types of sustainability need to be explored, leading to the theorisation of three possible scenarios (trade-offs, synergy, and independence). We discuss and put forward a research agenda.