The Anatomy of Sustainable Open Source Community Building The Cultural Point of View

Abstract. Open source software (OSS) communities are too various to permit a one-size-fits-all solution to sustainability and successful development. In particu-lar, the hacker ethic of volunteer communities and the salary-based work ethic of company-driven communities do not mix easily, and have very different condi-tions of sustainability. Based on earlier work on OSS community typology, we characterize three new cases of community (Wringer, IT Mill Toolkit, NoTA). These three communities are just being launched, and the typology suggests some possible bottlenecks of socio-cultural sustainability that the building communities may face