Governance of Collaborative Open Source Software: Inference from Transaction Cost Economics Model

Structural changes in open source software and increased involvement of commercial organizations in the development and governance of open source projects represent a departure from the „pure‟ open source paradigm and an emergence of a new collaborative model. In this paper we call for a new perspective on open source software research that explains this latest alliance with commercial vendors. We argue that open source is about governance, not just free code. It‟s the uniqueness of a governance model that differentiates successful collaborations. The transformation of OSS bazaar-like process to a more structured development, while maintaining the bazaar product could not be achieved successfully without the establishment of an optimal collaborative governance model