Going Open: Does it Mean Giving Away Control?

Abstract

Open source software has evolved from being an effort driven by a collective of volunteers to become an integral part of commercial software. Constant demands for new features besides maintaining product quality made companies seek open source as an answer for these demands. These growing demands brought with them control of quality, architecture, contribution management, and community management.This article explores the governance strategies adopted by open source software projects to manage the quality of complements (such as plug-ins that extend a platform's functionality) developed by community members outside the core team. The outcomes of the research contribute to our understanding of the strategies followed by different open source platform owners (the open source project initiators) to manage external innovation in the case of platform extensions in two areas: i) governance models and ii) regulatory tools.