[Themaintainers] Organizational learning to maintain (open sourcing)

[David Ing isss@daviding.com]

I'm going to branch a response to ...

> Open Source Software: What makes maintenance something people do ?

... by Jan Dittrich ...

... because I have a response to a different question.

The question is how do organizations learn the behaviours (not the
licensing) associated with open sourcing, when there is an alternative
(private sourcing) available in the commercial world?

The data for this comes from studies at IBM, 2001-2011.  IBM has started
some projects and then open-sourced them, changing the licensing terms.  In
parallel, however, IBM also joined open source communities started by
others (e.g. Linux, Apache), and then continues to continually invest in
maintaining the code base.

In a dissertation for Aalto U. that became a book, "*Open Innovation
Learning:  Theory-building on open sourcing*" while private sourcing
proposed three descriptive theories, and three normative theories.

The book is available as open access at
http://openinnovationlearning.com/online/ .

The major idea here is that we might not just focus on open sourcing as a
phenomenon by itself, but in the broader world of all software (and
services), in a commercial world.

Yes, there are unfunded open source projects (or maybe better described as
self-funded by the founders).  The reason that open sourcing has become of
so much interest is because corporations have invested heavily in sharing
resources beyond organizational boundaries.  The reason that this should be
of interest to the Maintainers community is that a large part of the
investment is in maintenance, not developing new-to-the-world programs.
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