Transition of governance in a mature open software source community: Evidence from the Debian case Bert M. Sadowski a, * , Gaby Sadowski-Rasters b , Geert Duysters c,1 a University of Technology Eindhoven, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands b Municipality of Eindhoven, P.O. Box 90150, 5600 RB Eindhoven, The Netherlands c UNU-MERIT, Keizer Karelplein 19, 6211 TC Maastricht, The Netherlands article info Article history: Available online 15 May 2008 JEL classification: 030 Keywords: Open source software community Governance Debian abstract As open source software (OSS) communities mature, they have to introduce a variety of governance mechanisms to manage the participation of their members and to coordinate the launch of new releases. The Debian community introduced new mechanisms of infor- mal administrative control based on a constitution, elected leaders, and used interactive communication channels. We show that these control mechanisms were introduced as a response to emerging innovative opportunities due to the usage of source packages and to the need to build a responsive organization within the Debian OSS community. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction There is a continuing fascination with open source software (OSS) communities, not only due to an explosion in the num- ber of volunteers participating in these communities but also due to the unique forms of producing and distributing OSS. The growth of OSS communities, however, in combination with increased demand for OSS software, has created mounting pres- sure on these communities to adapt their organizational forms to these changes. As a result, OSS communities have adopted a variety of new ways of producing and distributing OSS (Lee and Cole, 2003; Lerner and Tirole, 2002; van Krogh et al., 2003). In OSS communities, the creation of new knowledge requires, on the one hand, a set of organizational rules and structures that allow critical evaluation of existing knowledge, innovation, and rapid elimination of error (Kogut, 2000). On the other hand, there is a growing need to reduce the time available for the introduction of new releases, while at the same time main- taining high quality (Michlmayr, 2004, 2007). Innovation and the need to develop new software features should therefore not be at the expense of reducing the quality of existing (and new) software packages. In fact, OSS communities need to cre- ate a situation in which they simultaneously balance exploration strategies, aimed at innovating and business development, with exploitation strategies that are primarily directed at making the most of existing competences. Tushman and O’Reilly (1996) compared this balancing act to the god Janus who had two sets of eyes. One pair was for looking at what lies behind and one pair for focusing on what lies ahead. Due to this balancing act, the organizational forms to coordinate and govern collaborative work have to be flexible and should be able to adapt easily to heterogeneous learning conditions (March, 1991). The Debian OSS community fits this general picture, with the number of developers increasing from a sheer total of 60 in 1996 to over 9000 in 2005, and with the number of source packages rising from 250 in 1995 to 10.869 by February, 2006. During this ten-year period, the growth of Debian was accompanied by a search for different governance forms after the ori- 0167-6245/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infoecopol.2008.05.001 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 (0) 402475510; fax: +31 (0) 402474646. E-mail addresses: b.m.sadowski@tm.tue.nl (B.M. Sadowski), g.sadowski@eindhoven.nl (G. Sadowski-Rasters), duysters@merit.unu.edu (G. Duysters). 1 Tel.: +31 43 3884413. Information Economics and Policy 20 (2008) 323–332 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Information Economics and Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/iep