The free and open source software (F/OSS) mode of production is a new paradigm in the division of innovative labor. It may have transformative economic impacts not only in the sphere of software system products, but eventually find important applications over a much broader range of information-goods and -services. To investigate those potentialities requires that we first understand "the open source way of working:" How do F/OSS projects mobilize resources, allocate expertise, and retain the commitment of developers who contribute their work largely without direct compensation? How do different classes of projects vary in terms of their relative productivity performances, and how does F/OSS productivity compare with that of conventional commercial software firms? How fully are the products of these self-organized efforts able meet the long-term needs of other software users, rather than simply providing satisfactions of various kinds (including custom-built, reliable code) for the developers themselves? This multi-team research project is pursuing answers to these basic economic questions in an integrated research program that analyzes micro-level survey information on F/OSS developers, authorship distributions and code-structure data extracted by computer-automated methods from the source code itself, and agent-based stochastic simulation modeling of the dynamics of resource allocation within and among projects.
