Graduate Supervisory Committee:

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the product of volunteers collaborating to build software in an open, public manner. The large number of FLOSS projects, combined with the data that is inherently archived with this online process, make studying this phe-nomenon attractive. Some FLOSS projects are very functional, well-known, and successful, such as Linux, the Apache Web Server, and Firefox. However, for every successful FLOSS project there are 100’s of projects that are unsuccessful. These projects fail to attract suf-ficient interest from developers and users and become inactive or abandoned before useful functionality is achieved. The goal of this research is to better understand the open source development process and gain insight into why some FLOSS projects succeed while others fail. This dissertation presents an agent-based model of the FLOSS development pro-cess. The model is built around the concept that projects must manage to attract contri-butions from a limited pool of participants in order to progress. In the model developer and user agents select from a landscape of competing FLOSS projects based on perceive