“The interest and use of open source software and methodology
has gained an increasing amount of commercial attention, and we are
currently witnessing that established proprietary software firms
are taking a step further by opening their own software projects in
an attempt to create firm-sponsored open source communities.
Siobhan O’Mahony’s research finds that these firms have to handle a
tension between openness and control in their product development,
but little research has been done to detail how this balance is
achieved. I have studied the American software company Novell and
the openSUSE project, largely guided by an inductive, qualitative
approach supplemented by some quantitative methods…”