Managing the open cathedral.

Already early in the history of open source projects it became apparent that they are driven by only a few contributors, creating the biggest portion of code. Whereas this has already been shown in previous research, this work adds a time perspective and considers the dynamics and evolution of communities. These aspects become increasingly important with the growing involvement of firms in such communities. Open source software is today used in many commercial applications, but also gets actively developed by businesses. Therefore, understanding and managing such projects into a common direction gets of increasing interest. The author’s work is intended to build a better understanding of these communities, their dynamics over time, key players and dependencies on them.