Strategic Interaction and Knowledge Sharing in Open Source Software Communities

This paper argues that open source software (OSS) developers often strategically select to work with other highly resourceful individuals to form a small but better organized network to manage a large but potentially chaotic OSS community. The small network arrangement affords individual developers to engage in a reciprocal interdependent relationship, which not only brings them closer to the centre of the OSS development but also expedites the releases and exchanges of individual knowledge resources. Based on separate analyses of two OSS development mailing lists of over 1500 messages, the present study indicates that the OSS developers that belonged to the network not only regularly contribute content and code but also intensively engage in knowledge reuse and combination. Implications of the present findings are discussed.