Open Source Communities

places; on the contrary, they come from literally all continents and they interact and collaborate virtually. OSS communities resemble other online communities in the sense that they are “collectives of individuals that cohere around a shared spirit” (Hollenbeck, 2006, p. 576) and they make use of the Internet as the dominant medium for communication and interaction sociated with the hacker culture in which openness and freedom are essential characteristics (Himanen, 2001). What differentiates OSS communities from most other online communities is that its contributors create a viable and competitive product. For example, the Web server Apache delivers Web pages for roughly two thirds of all Internet domains, the DNS server Bind has a market share of at least 75%, and the operating system GNU/Linux is becoming more and more popular for both servers and desktop computers. Also, private and public organizations are increasingly adopting and moving to OSS. Like other online communities, open source communities provide a unique possibility to study how social networks are created and how they evolve through time. Since all communication and interaction is publicly available, researchers can –in real time– observe and analyze how such networks are created and sustained (Ellis, 2002; Rheingold, 1994). On top of that, individuals in open source communities have moved beyond the level of mere interaction and have been able to produce a large number of public goods (see also Smith, 1992). Not only have they created competitive software, they have also created a) related artifacts such as sophisticated collaboration tools, and b) a set of legal constructs to protect their way of communication and interaction against outside threats (O’Mahony, 2003; van Wendel