Understanding Open Source Communities as Complex Adaptive Systems: A Case of the R Project Community

Open source communities evolve. This evolution is, at times, driven by corporate engagement with those communities. In these corporate-communal contexts, open source foundations often serve as facilitators in the evolution process and make these arrangements more stable over time. This paper expands the application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to understand the role of open source foundations as facilitators in the evolution of corporate-communal arrangements. We present the case of the R Project community and how we can leverage complex adaptive systems as a way to understand the evolution of the community as driven by corporate engagement and facilitated by open source foundations. We develop the theory of CAS by enhancing the understanding of attractors in the evolution of CAS.