Title
Standards and coordination in open source software
Author
Tineke M Egyedi, and Ruben van Wendel de Joode
Date
1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 1/5/2003)
(Original Publish Date: 1/5/2003)
Abstract
Almost by definition, Open Source Software (OSS) offers an incentive to elaborate and adapt source code. One would expect this in-built tendency towards divergence to lead to incompatible strains of software, and, consequently to a clamour for standardisation. This is only partly the case. Why? Which other coordinative mechanisms are at work apart from the standards initiatives? From standards literature we distil four categories of coordinative mechanisms, and illustrate their relevance with OSS examples. Finally, in the conclusion we re-address the complementary relation between the four categories and committee standardisation.