What effect does Distributed Version Control have on OSS project organization?

Many Open Source Software (OSS) projects are moving form Centralized Version Control (CVC) to Distributed Version Control (DVC). The effect of this shift on project organization and developer collaboration is not well understood. In this paper, we use a theoretical argument to evaluate the appropriateness of using DVC in the context of two very common organization forms in OSS: a dictatorship and a peer group. We find that DVC facilitates large hierarchical communities as well as smaller groups of developers, while CVC allows for consensus-building by a peer group. We also find that the flexibility of DVC systems allows for diverse styles of developer collaboration. With CVC, changes flow up and down (and publicly) via a central repository. In contrast, DVC facilitates collaboration in which work output can flow sideways (and privately) between collaborators, with no repository being inherently more important or central. These sideways flows are a relatively new concept. Developers on the Linux project, who tend to be experienced DVC users, cluster around “sandboxes:” repositories where developers can work together on a particular topic, isolating their changes from other developers. In this work, we focus on two large, mature OSS projects to illustrate these findings. However, we suggest that social media sites like GitHub may engender other original styles of collaboration that deserve further study.