Attractiveness of Open Source Projects: A Path to Software Quality

The Open Source Software movement is impacting society and organizations in significant ways. This impact can be observed not only economically but also on the way business processes like software development are performed within organizations. The success of open source software is attributed to its practices and organizational structure. Consequently, there is a trend in the corporate environment to copy and adapt some of these practices, such as releasing software source code to the community, giving up proprietary rights. This paper is an attempt to model what are the drivers for success of this specific practice-trend of releasing source code to the community by corporations. Thus, to understand (1) what the specific sponsor's motivations to engage in projects intended to release source code are, thereby defining success of the practice, and (2) the conditions under which those projects are more likely to generate desirable outcomes become important to both researchers and practitioners. This paper pursues both of these topics, presenting propositions to empirically explain the numbers of contributions and contributors – attractiveness – a corporate project has observed and why. We assume that attractiveness leads to software quality, a condition desired by profit-oriented managers.