Stefan Haefliger

Carrots and rainbows: motivation and social practice in open source software development

Open source software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation-practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS.

Code Reuse in Open Source Software

Code reuse is a form of knowledge reuse in software development that is fundamental to innovation in many fields. However, to date there has been no systematic investigation of code reuse in open source software projects. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data gathered from a sample of six open source software projects to explore two sets of research questions derived from the literature on software reuse in firms and open source software development. We find that code reuse is extensive across the sample and that open source software developers, much like developers in firms, apply tools that lower their search costs for knowledge and code, assess the quality of software components, and have incentives to reuse code. Open source software developers reuse code because they want to integrate functionality quickly, because they want to write preferred code, because they operate under limited resources in terms of time and skills, and because they can mitigate development costs through code reuse.

The open innovation research landscape: Established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholars – having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on ‘Researching Open Innovation’ at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on OI, organised at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study OI – originally an organisational-level phenomenon – across multiple levels of analysis. While our integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting and integrating various perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorising will be needed to advance OI research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research – particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.

Knowledge Reuse in Open Source Software: An Exploratory Study of 15 Open Source Projects

To date, there is no investigation of knowledge reuse in open source software projects. This paper focuses on the forms of knowledge reuse and the factors impacting on them. It develops a theory drawn from data of 15 open source software projects and finds that the effort to search, integrate and maintain external knowledge influences the form of knowledge to be reused. Implications for firms and innovation research are discussed.

From Business Model to Business Modelling: Modularity and Manipulation

The concept of modularity has gained considerable traction in technology studies as a way to conceive, describe and innovate complex systems, such as product design or organizational structures. In the recent literature, technological modularity has often been intertwined with business model innovation, and scholarship has started investigating how modularity in technology affects changes in business models, both at the cognitive and activity system levels. Yet we still lack a theoretical definition of what modularity is in the business model domain. Business model innovation also encompasses different possibilities of modeling businesses, which are not clearly understood nor classified. We ask when, how and if modularity theory can be extended to business models in order to enable effective and efficient modeling. We distinguish theoretically between modularity for technology and for business models, and investigate the key processes of modularization and manipulation. We introduce the basic operations of business modeling via modular operators adapted from the technological modularity domain, using iconic examples to develop an analogical reasoning between modularity in technology and in business models. Finally, we discuss opportunities for using modularity theory to foster the understanding of business models and modeling, and develop a challenging research agenda for future investigations.

Opening up design science: The challenge of designing for reuse and joint development

The purpose of this paper is to advance design science by developing a framework for research on reuse and the relationship between external IT artifacts and their users. A design science approach to IS research needs to grapple with the fact that a number of relevant, economically attractive, external IT artifacts cannot be designed from scratch nor meaningfully evaluated based on the current state of development, and so design science research will struggle with incomplete cycles of design, relevance, and rigor. We suggest a strategic research agenda that integrates the design of the relationship between an external IT artifact and the user by considering the impact artifacts exert on users. Three dimensions derived from adaptive structuration theory inform our framework on three levels of design granularity (middle management, top management, and entrepreneur): agenda considers the dynamic properties of technological objects, adaptability refers to the functional affordance of external artifacts in development, and auspice captures the symbolic expression and scope for interpretation. We derive implications for research design.

Sampling in Open Source Software Development: The Case for Using the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution

Research on open source software (OSS) projects often focuses on the SourceForge collaboration platform. We argue that a GNU/Linux distribution, such as Debian, is better suited for the sampling of projects because it avoids biases and contains unique information only available in an integrated environment. Especially research on the reuse of components can build on dependency information inherent in the Debian GNU/Linux packaging system. This paper therefore contributes to the practice of sampling methods in OSS research and provides empirical data on reuse dependencies in Debian

Knowledge Creation in Open Source Software Development

Open Source development projects are internet-based communities of computer programmers (von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003). Internet technology not only enables worldwide and almost cost-free distribution of software, but also enables a distributed production of software by users (von Hippel, 2001). The physical distance between the community members (programmers) prevents most face-to-face contact. This condition, together with the internet-based communication that is limited to written conversation and software code, provide the basis for our investigation. Using knowledge creation theory we discuss and analyse the Open Source software development process. How is new knowledge generated in Open Source projects? Who constitutes Open Source communities and how do people interact? Based on findings that indicate a direct sharing of tacit knowledge in Open Source communities (von Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani, 2003), we propose how this may occur without co-location of the sharing parties. The knowledge creation process can be enabled by activities that take into account the emergent nature of Open Source projects. We address the question of what the role of a knowledge activist can be in Open Source and draw theoretical and practical implications.

When decision support systems fail: Insights for strategic information systems from Formula 1

Decision support systems (DSS) are sophisticated tools that increasingly take advantage of big data and are used to design and implement individual - and organization - level strategic decisions . Yet, when organizations excessively rely on their potential the outcome may be decision - making failure, particularly when such tools are applied under high pressure and turbulent conditions. Partial understanding and unidimensional interpretation can prevent learning from failure. Building on a practice perspective, we study an iconic case of strategic failure in Formula 1 racing. Our approach, which integrates the decision maker as well as the organizational and material context , identifies three interrelated sources of strategic failure that are worth investigation for decision - makers using DSS and big data: (1) t he situated nature and affordances of decision - making ; (2) t he distributed nature of cognition in decision - making; and (3) the performativity of the DSS. We outline specific research questions and their implications for firm performance and competitive advantage. Finally, we advance an agenda that can help close timely gaps in strategic IS research.

Rules, Practices, and Information Technology: A Trifecta of Organizational Regulation

As information technology (IT) based regulation has become critical and pervasive for contemporary organizing, Information Systems research turns mostly a deaf ear to the topic. Current explanations of IT-based regulation fit into received frameworks such as structuration theory, actor-network theory, or neo-institutional analyses but fail to recognize the unique capacities IT and related IT based regulatory practices offer as a powerful regulatory means. Any IT-based regulation system is made up of rules, practices and IT artifacts and their relationships. We propose this trifecta as a promising lens to study IT-based regulation in that it sensitizes scholars into how IT artifacts mediate rules and constitute regulatory processes embracing rules, capacities of IT endowed by the artifact, and organizational practices. We review the concepts of rules and IT-based regulation and identify two gaps in the current research on organizational regulation: 1)the critical role of sense-making as part of IT based regulation, and 2)the challenge of temporally coupling rules and their enactment during IT based regulation. To address these gaps we introduce the concept of regulatory episode as a unit of analysis for studying IT-based regulation. We also formulate a tentative research agenda for IT-based regulation that focuses on tensions triggered by the three key elements of the IT-based regulatory processes.