Project Overview

1. We are using the findings from the first year of the project to become participants ourselves in open communities. In particular, we are working with organizations around the integration of FOSSology and SPDX.
2. Organizational participation in open communities is timely in light of recent analyses by the Linux Foundation indicating that 75 percent of kernel contributions are from paid developers. As such, open communities create complicated issues for organizations and researchers.
3. As design and development evolves within open communities, there are an increasing number of ways that organizations may seek to balance ‘contributions to’ and ‘differentiation from’ an open community, for reasons of cost, resource management, and time to market.
4. This project focuses on why organizations participate with open communities, how they participate with open communities, and what we should be teaching prospective community members regarding open community participation.