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Understanding Community Behaviors in For-Profit Open Source Hardware Projects

Part of: Innovation Engineering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Zhuoxuan Li ,
Warren Seering ,
Tiffany Tao  and
Shengnan Cao
Zhuoxuan Li*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Warren Seering
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tiffany Tao
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Shengnan Cao
Affiliation:
Northeastern University
*
Contact: Li, Zhuoxuan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mechanical Engineering, United States of America, zxli@mit.edu

Abstract

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Free contributors have successfully shown the potential in large/complex software co-creation in the Free and Open Source Software Movement, triggering many discussions and exploration ventures from academia to industry and to the government. Though many research efforts explored whether the same level of co-creation efforts could take place broadly in the hardware realm, very few research studies focus on profit-seeking hardware projects initiated by companies. In fact, the specific nature of being tangible and profitable makes company-led open source hardware projects suspicious to be really “open” to contributors. Community has been identified as the critical driver in many open projects. By reviewing the evolution of company-community interactions over time and different community behaviors in different open development context, authors in this paper hope to identify best community- company interaction forms for open source hardware companies. Using grounded theory and case studies, we construct a framework to describe and identify company community's different behaviors and different roles.

Keywords

Open source designOpen innovationDesign managementCollaborative design
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 2397 - 2406
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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