Guest Editorial Open source software: investigating the software engineering, psychosocial and economic issues

While the concept of free software is as old as software itself, there has been an explosion of academic and commercial interest in the topic since the coining of the term ‘open source software’ (OSS) in 1998. Opinion on OSS tends to be quite polemic. On the positive side, we see those who point to OSS as the paradigm shift needed to solve the now decades-old ‘software crisis’ (i.e. systems taking too long to develop, costing too much and not working very well when eventually delivered). These advocates highlight the quality and reliability of OSS products, the rapid release schedules of many OSS projects and the reduced cost of OSS development and ownership. At the extreme, technology publisher Tim O’Reilly has identified OSS as the language of the networked community, suggesting that it will be the dominant mode of work for knowledge-workers in the information society. In this vein, papers have begun to emerge that have identified OSS as a model that transfers well beyond software development into other industry spheres, for example economics, governance, law, education, medicine and even the stock market (cf. Feller and Fitzgerald, 2001; Feller et al., 2001). However, countering this positive expansionist view, there are many who suggest that OSS is just the latest ‘silver bullet’ in the software industry, characterizing it as an overhyped strategy employed by the weak to compete with the strong. Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com) has described OSS as ‘utopian balderdash’, and Roger Sessions (an influential researcher of COM, DCOM and other middle-ware technologies) has even suggested that OSS is ‘a disaster waiting to happen’. Even if we narrow our scope to look at the specific case of the Linux operating system, we find the same intensity of disagreement. The original creators of the Unix operating system stand firmly on opposite sides of the fence, with Dennis Ritchie describing Linux as ‘commendable’, and Ken Thompson declaring that Linux ‘is quite unreliable’ and ‘will not be very successful in the long run’. Although OSS research is gathering momentum, to date there have been relatively few analytical studies that have investigated the OSS phenomenon in detail. Many of the earliest accounts of the phenomenon predate the use of the open source label; instead, using Richard Stallman’s term ‘free software’ to describe systems such as Linux and Bind. Although extremely valuable and highly influential, these early accounts tended to be: Info Systems J (2001) 11, 273–276 273