Initiating a commercial open source digital platform

Morten M. Christensen, John Gøtze
2016 Zenodo  
This thesis is about starting a new commercial open source software project in the digital platform category. The focus is on project initiation (before a community of external contributors exists), where I will cover the concerns that a firm must address right from the start if the project should have a good chance of eventual success. I define success as depending on fulfilment of two conflicting goals: Obtaining a significant community of contributors to the project AND profiting from the
more » ... ulting software. For its research this thesis uses a wide range of existing literature from different academic areas and sources. For structure I use a new holistic approach looking at my research subjects from 3 perspectives: a business perspective, a community perspective and a technical perspective. A significant output of my research is a new holistic model for project attractiveness that firms can use to evaluate the ability for a project to potentially attract (rather than repel) a community of contributors.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.3960763 fatcat:5fh2gxrarraqllikcelosy6loq