Master’s Thesis

This is the page for my master thesis at the University of Oslo. The thesis carries the title:

Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities

– A Case Study on Novell and The openSUSE Project

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For the impatient: Download the full thesis here (3.8 Mb) Full thesis

A low-quality version (1.2 Mb) is also available Full thesis (compressed)

Since the thesis is about 130 pages, you might want to have a look at the summaries and follow my reading-guide below, so you can easily access the things you are interested in.

Summary

• I would advise you to start off with reading the short academic abstract first, in this post.
• I have also written a 5-page executive summary. You can also download it as a pdf. This is more focused on the findings and practical conclusions, and less on the theoretical/academic contributions in the thesis. This is not a detective-novel, so nothing is saved for the end. Recommended!
• I have also created this page of the thesis in pictures, where I show all the figures in the thesis. Together, they provide a good illustration of the various issues, theories and findings in the thesis.

However, the glory of this thesis is not in its conclusions, but in the detailed descriptions and analysis. I would therefore (obviously) recommend that you have a look at some of the chapters below.

Reading guide

Executive summary

Ch.1 Introduction— The introduction is a presentation and a summary of the entire project, and introduces the motivation for the project and the research questions I have been pursuing. Don’t worry if the theory in this section is confusing, as it will be explained in much more detail later. You should read the introduction first no matter which chapters are interesting for you later.

Ch. 2 Theory — The theory chapter is divided in 3 parts: The first part details research and theories on open source software development and particularly the emerging business models around open source. The second part presents the theory of boundary objects in detail, which is used later to describe the role of Bugzilla, the OpenSUSE Build Service and the Factory code-base in the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. The third theory section details Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems, which is used to distinguish Novell and the openSUSE community, respectively.

Ch 3 Methodology — This chapter describes how I have gathered data , and what kind of information my analysis in this thesis is built upon. I also discuss the reliabilty and validity (the quality and “truth”) in these data.

Ch 4 Empirical-findings — From here on we wander into the world of Novell and the openSUSE project. Based largely on interviews with developers, managers and community members, this chapter presents some of the history of the openSUSE project, the software products, the development process and the openSUSE community.

Ch. 5 Analysis and discussion — This chapter is the most interesting part of the thesis (in my own opinion), and merges the theories outlined in the second chapter with the empirical reality in Novell. This chapter discusses how Novell and the openSUSE community are distinguished from each other, what mechanisms that bind them together in collaboration and includes a discussion of some possible future scenarios the for the openSUSE project.

Ch. 6 Conclusion — This last chapter reviews the research questions and summarizes the answers. I also discuss what we have learned from this study, and how we can take this knowledge further.