Firm-Sponsored Developers in Open Source Software Projects

This research aims at synthesizing literature on social capital theory and OSS communities to arrive at a conceptual model of social capital and individuals' value creation in OSS communities. Accordingly, it targets at replicating prior research that used social capital to predict diverse forms of outcome by using alternative operationalizations of the different social capital dimensions as well as forms of outcome and includes firm-sponsorship as moderator into the models. As a result of this research, it can be noted that the proven relationship between an OSS contributor's social capital and his created value is affected by firm-sponsorship. Furthermore, it could be shown that the proven relationship between an OSS contributor's social capital and associated individual outcomes is not affected by firm-sponsorship.

Dirk Homscheid received his doctorate from the University of Koblenz-Landau. His main research areas are social capital in Open Source software communities as well as application developer involvement in mobile platforms.