ABSTRACT:
An organizational strategy to deal with software development has been
developed in the market. Organizations openly release source code and
hope to attract volunteers to improve their projects (software).
Examples of organizations that have used this strategy include: a) IBM
released Eclipse, which is now an independent entity; b) SAP provides
the Netweaver environment to its clients so they can develop SAP
applications; and c) Mozilla released its email client Thunderbird and
already enjoys a comfortable position within the open source
community. This research proposes a theory to explain constructs of
interest for organizations that adopt such a "going-open" strategy. It
is proposed that attractiveness of these projects is a central tenet,
leading to activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion, and
time for task completion of these communities of open source projects,
though not linearly, as task complexity is believed to moderate the
links between them. It is also proposed that activeness, efficiency,
likelihood of task completion, and time for task completion mediate
the relationship between attractiveness and software quality.
Additionally, the model proposes that four open software projects'
characteristics (license type, intended audience, type of project, and
project's life-cycle stage) influence their level of activity directly
and indirectly, through attractiveness. This theoretical model was
tested using structural equation modeling on data from the largest
repository of open source projects, Sourceforge.net.





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