Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Volume 29, Issue 5, Pages 500-520Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/0960085X.2020.1756003
Keywords
Open source software; ideologies; structures of work; licence; superposition; instrument variable
Funding
- French National Research Agency (ANR), Investissements d'Avenir [LabEx Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX -0047]
- HEC Paris Foundation
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Though volunteer-driven Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (FLOSS) development were founded on the ideological beliefs of openness and absence of any commercial appropriation, in recent years, FLOSS movement has witnessed two ideological shifts. First, the emergence of permissive FLOSS licences that allow commercial appropriation of the collaboratively developed code, and second, organisational ownership of FLOSS projects. Because ideological beliefs shape the motivational needs of the volunteer contributors, and motivational needs influence the dominant work structures, it is expected that ideological shifts could influence the mechanisms through which work is orchestrated in FLOSS projects. Motivated by the need to understand the impact of these ideological shifts, we theorise the mechanisms through which the two ideological shifts alter the influence of FLOSS work structures on project outcomes of popularity and survival. Adopting an instrument variable approach, our analysis of projects hosted on GitHub confirms the significance of both the ideological shifts with some interesting contextual differences across the two project outcomes. Specifically, we find that the ideological shift pertaining to licence type has a significant influence on both the examined project outcomes, whereas organisational ownership has a significant influence only on the popularity of FLOSS projects.
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