Understanding the community culture in open-source software projects

Abstract

Open-source software now holds a dominant position in the software industry. Open-source software projects follow a community-based software development approach unlike that of the traditional software paradigm. Software developers voluntarily participate and contribute to an open-source project. It is important to understand the motivations for this volunteerism and the communication means they use to collaborate with each other. It is important to understand how people work together to develop complex systems in the open-source movement. This paper attempts to understand the contributions of several research studies undertaken in this regard.