A behavioural approach for the coordination of open source software intermediaries

Abstract

An interesting phenomenon in the open source software (OSS) market is the evolution of intermediaries, which provide services to the OSS community. A problem of this business model is the lack of appropriate instruments to dismantle coordination problems inherent to the OSS development model. Therefore, this paper proposes a behavioural approach to coordinate OSS intermediaries. Since OSS intermediaries typically provide internet based services, it is possible to observe actor behaviour by use of technical data acquisition instruments like server logging. Consequently, it seems reasonable to analyse this behavioural data base to derive relevant information to ensure rationality of management. We present exploratory results for the intermediary CampusSource to evaluate the utility of this data source and link them to relevant aspects of diffusion theory. This contribution is based on our results presented in [GBK04].