ABSTRACT

The leadership and organizational dynamics for an open source project is sometimes called project governance. This term suggests a collaborative process that is driven by factors other than cost and profit. Open source projects are gift economies. The organization that runs an

open source software project differs in fundamental ways from that which oversees a proprietary project. Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar [Ray01] was a landmark publication describing the organizational differences between these two extremes. However, many shades of gray have evolved as open source has become

popular, even among projects that originated as proprietary software. An open source community in its most mature form is quite diverse. It includes not only individual volunteers, but also corporations with paid contributors, academics, and practitioners. Governing such a diverse group is fundamentally democratic, in the sense that one's citizenship is determined by one's contributions to the project. Within the open source spectrum, project governance varies depending on

the type and maturity of the project. These variations are due to the fundamental differences in community size, ownership models, and diversity of the user community. In this chapter, we study the important elements of project governance for

an open source project.