GuEst Editorial PrEfacE Open Source Software Research: An Evolving Endeavor

i The purpose of this special issue is to provide a rigorous examination of the open source software (OSS) movement, with special consideration to the impact it has on not only the software products, but also the software industry as a whole. Naturally, the OSS movement is large and has many facets that could be worthwhile to investigate. For this special issue, we tried to take as open an approach as possible to soliciting articles pertaining to OSS from diverse perspectives. We were particularly interested in communities and participants in the OSS development process and in the evolving positioning of OSS in the organizational environment. This special issue, as you will see, includes articles answering interesting questions from these two areas. One common speculation on OSS pertains to the effect of the idealized early model of OSS community influence domains outside of software development. In a recent trade press publication, Tapscott and Williams (2006) lump open source with social network communities (based presumably on their widespread participation and non-cash compensated contributions) and proclaim a social revolution in the making. Ironically, such proclamation may be coming at the same time that OSS communities are being pressured and shaped by market forces to evolve away from the freewheeling social phenomenon toward a more disciplined and organized approach to selling services based on software distributed under relatively open licensing. Indeed, it has become clear that, over the past decade, open source software has evolved tremendously. As Fitzgerald (2006) points out, the portrait of " supremely talented software programmers who volunteer their services " has become a myththough perhaps at one time it described most OSS communities. If this mythical portrait is no longer accurate at describing the OSS movement, what has replaced it? Fitzgerald (2006) has termed this more complex portrait OSS 2.0. He characterizes this emergent phenomenon as balancing a " commercial profit value-for-money proposition while still adhering to acceptable open source community values. " In a similar fashion, (forthcoming) have described the second generation of open source (referred as OSSg2) as a hybrid business model combining characteristics of corporate distribution (where a company provides complementary services around OSS) and sponsored OSS (where a company provides