Abstract

Increasingly open source (OS) software development is organized in a way similar to how a corporation would organize development. This paper examines this corporatizing effect by studying the relationship between peer-oriented social structures and goal-oriented technical structures in the Plone community. Social structures are said to exhibit assortative mixing, a like attract like characteristic whereas technical structures exhibits an opposite effect of disassortative mixing. Our first finding suggests that the patterns of collaborative contributions and interdependences among software modules exhibit the characteristic of disassortative mixing. Specifically, Plone developers were more likely to contribute to modules that already have a high concentration of contributions, which in turn lead to an increase in module reuse over time. This finding contributes to the debate of whether social systems are strictly assortative, and technological systems strictly disassortative (Newman, 2002). Our second contribution concerns the impact of corporatizing OSS projects, suggesting that corporatizing OS development had the effect of weakening the social organizing among developers, and shifted the patterns of contributions to adhere with the technical requirements.

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