Dear All, Hope everyone is doing well. I am pleased to have posted the following 7 new papers to our website. Our community now has over 200 working papers! Current count is at 207. Wow! Many thanks to all the authors for their submissions and in keeping the community growing and vibrant. Here is to an enjoyable spring/fall! Warmly, Karim Paper 1 Author Sandeep Krishnamurthy Title The Launching of Mozilla Firefox- A Case Study in Community-Led Marketing http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/sandeep2.pdf Abstract: Mozilla Firefox is a Free/Libre/Open Source (FLOSS) browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation. This browser was recently released and has met with considerable success- it has been downloaded more than 20 million times and has already taken considerable market share from its prime competitor- Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. In this paper, I chronicle how the efforts of 63000 volunteers led to a community successfully competing with a powerful corporation. I identify four factors as the key facilitators to Firefox’ success- complacent competition, product superiority, presence of marketing leader and volunteer support. Paper 2 Author Martin Michlmayr Title Managing Volunteer Activity in Free Software Projects http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/michlmayr-mia.pdf Abstract During the last few years, thousands of volunteers have created a large body of free software. Even though this accomplishment shows that the free software development model works, there are some drawbacks associated with this model. Due to the volunteer nature of most free software projects, it is impossible to fully rely on participants. Volunteers may become busy and neglect their duties. This may lead to a steady decrease of quality as work is not being carried out. The problem of inactive volunteers is intensified by the fact that most free software projects are distributed, which makes it hard to quickly identify volunteers who neglect their duties. This paper shows Debian's approach to inactive volunteers. Insights presented here can be applied to other free software projects in order to implement effective quality assurance strategies. Paper 3 Author Stefan Behringer Title The Provision of a Public Good with a direct Provision Technology and Large Number of Agents http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/behringer.pdf Abstract This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large. A canonical example for a public good that is produced with a direct provision technology is Open Source Software. Paper 4 Author Geroge Dafermos Title The critical delusion of the condition of digitisation http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/dafermos_ccc.pdf Abstract This essay analyses how digital media prosthetics, institutionalisation (in particular the manifestations of copyright and patent law which lurk behind vested interests in controlling the transition to a vastly more powerful new world), and the imperatives of corporate planning have come into a conflict so fierce that shared lived experience, increasingly, is forced to undergo a rapid process of commodification. This struggle, which can no longer be defined through the lens of geography or class alone, in turn, points to a not too distant future in which commons-based peer production/consumption is exploited within the context of intense social taylorism and digital fordism with the ultimate goal to turn culture into a paid-for experience, and hence moving the terrain of struggle away from the surplus value of labour to the legitimacy of knowledge sharing and pervasive networking, and how the latter can be monetised and controlled in accordance with anarcho-capitalist agendas. Obviously, the question which we ought to pose to ourselves is how the revolutionary demands of hacking can be guided, assembled, and reproduced, so that this process of commodification is consciously resisted by technology developers and users alike, artists, and all those whose creativity and desire for socially conscious technological innovation and emergent social co-operation have been enhanced by the digital condition we're increasingly in the centre of. Paper 5 Authors Cristina Rossi and Andrea Bonaccorsi Title Intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms in Open Source software. Do firms practise what they preach? http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/rossi_motivations.pdf Abstract A growing body of economic literature is exploring the incentives of the agents involved in the Open Source movement. However, most empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (Open Source firms). This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of firms that engage in Open Source activities. Data on firms’ motivations were collected by a large-scale survey conducted on 146 Italian companies supplying Open Source (OS) solutions and show that intrinsic, community-based incentives do play a role. Nevertheless, these positive attitudes towards the values of the OS community, which are quite surprising by profit-oriented firms, are not in general put into practise. Discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours is a widely investigated phenomenon in social psychology literature. We explore its pattern in our sample, find that it does not concern all the respondents, and single out a group of firms adopting a more consistent behaviour. Our results are in line with the literature on individual motivations in organisations and Open Source business models. Paper 6 Author Matthias Stürmer Title: Open Source Community Building http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/sturmer.pdf Abstract Building an active and helpful community around an open source project is a complex task for its leaders. Therefore investigations in this work are intended to define the optimum starting position of an open source project and to identify recommendable promoting actions by project leaders to enlarge community size in a healthy way. For this paper eight interviews with committed representatives of successful open source projects have led to over 12 hours of conversation about community building. Analysing the statements of these experienced community members exposed helpful activities that led to the presently prospering communities of their projects. Summarizing the conclusions of this qualitative research a table with conditions for successful open source project initialisation and a subject-level promotion matrix of community building could be created. They include suggestions on how to start a new open source project and how to improve and increase the community of an already advanced open source project. Paper 7 Author Norbert Bollow Title: Webservice Protocol Design for Economic Liberty and Observability http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/bollow.pdf Abstract One big potential benefit of the webservices paradigm is in reducing the costs of inter-firm business transactions. That should allow small and medium-sized enterprises to compete successfully with big firms. This paper considers specifically the economic needs of peer-to-peer business alliances, defined as multiparty business alliances which are not under the control of any single firm or any small group of alliance members, so that each participating firm has full economic liberty. This organisational form is appropriate for example for Free Software businesses. The main conclusions are that achieving economic observability of business transactions is of great importance, and that this is difficult to achieve with the Remote Procedure Calls paradigm of JINI or XML / HTTP / SOAP based webservices. The problem can be overcome by using the SXDF / QQP / QRPC suite of webservice protocols,