Firm-Sponsored Developers in Open Source Software Projects: A Social Capital Perspektive

Open source software (OSS) communities do not only consist of voluntary contributors, but diverse contributor groups, including hobbyists, research institutions, universities and companies. The plethora of OSS research has contributed to understand the phenomenon of OSS and its implications for business, but they lack the differentiation of different contributor groups with respect to the motives of the contributors' involvement in OSS projects.Aside from burgeoning research that has used social capital theory to investigate online communities, important aspects that pertain to the role of existing contributor groups (e.g., hobbyists and firm-sponsored developers) in OSS communities have not been addressed yet. Research has to show, if the associations between network position and positive outcome as predicted by social capital theory are independent of developers' profession. As firms are identified to have a major impact in OSS communities, the group of firm-sponsored contributors is seen as lead contributor group in the further considerations of this dissertation.First, this research investigates the different contributor groups associated with public and increasing private interests interacting in an OSS development project (Study I) to create a sound starting position for the further studies of this dissertation, in relation to existing contributor groups in an OSS project. Second, this dissertation aims at synthesizing literature on social capital theory and more recent literature on OSS communities to arrive at a conceptual model of social capital and individuals' value creation in OSS communities. Accordingly, it targets at replicating prior research that used social capital to predict diverse forms of outcome by using alternative operationalizations of the different social capital dimensions as well as forms of outcome (i.e., source code contribution (Study II), three forms of personal characteristics: opinion leadership, perceived own reputation, job autonomy (Study III)). Third, this research aims at challenging social capital theory by including firm-sponsorship in the models to see whether it may influence the relationship between social capital and forms of outcome.As a result, it can be noted that the proven relationship between an OSS contributor's social capital and his created value is affected by firm-sponsorship. Furthermore, it could be shown that the proven relationship between an OSS contributor's social capital and associated individual outcomes is not affected by firm-sponsorship.