May 14, 2009, 5:30 am
The Finnish research project “Managing OSS As an Integrated Part of Business (OSSI)” (2005-2007) developed a management framework by examining the phenomena from the perspectives of sociology, technology and business. The business perspective was examined further in the research project in terms of legal aspects, economics, business models, competitive strategy, and value networks.
Since the role of the developer communities is highly important in open source software, the study took a community-based approach and studied four Open Source communities – Debian, Eclipse + Laika, GNOME, MySQL – and the networks and business models that have evolved around them.
This report comprises four sections, the introduction part, the community part, the OSS evaluation part and finally, the conclusion. In addition to this main content of the report, there are four appendices, which bring up complementary views on OSS, in the end of the report.
