Open Entrepreneurship: Investigating Entrepreneurship in Open Source Software Communities

This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in the literature on entrepreneurship in open source software (OSS) communities. Although it is well documented that entrepreneurs can gain economic benefits from participating in OSS, limited attention has been paid to the dynamics and activities through which such benefits are realized and conditioned. The present research therefore explores the different stakeholder groups in an OSS community, describes and classifies what is observed about entrepreneurs’ roles and activities in them, and explains why entrepreneurs behave the way they do. This is achieved through a single case study of the OpenSimulator OSS community, employing three theories (stakeholder theory, social capital theory, and collective resource theory) as lenses to interpreting the study’s empirical findings. The research develops a more fine-grained understanding of stake­holder groups in OSS communities, highlighting entrepreneurs as a groups with distinct characteristics. Entrepreneurs’ tendency to build social capital in an OSS setting, enabling access to resources that are socially embedded within the community, is demonstrated. Conceptualizing OSS as a common-pool resource, in relation to which entrepreneurs need to deal with the risk of resource depletion and sanctions imposed by the community, an explanatory model for entrepreneurship in OSS is developed involving the need to strike a balance between subtraction and replenishment of the resource.