REPORT: The social structure of free and open source software development

Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary development by emphasizing FOSS's distinctive social and communications structures. But what do we really know about the communication patterns of FOSS projects? How generalizable are the projects that have been studied? Is there consistency across FOSS projects? Questioning the assumption of distinctiveness is important because practitioner-advocates from within the FOSS community rely on features of social structure to describe and account for some of the advantages of FOSS production. - First Monday http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/crowston/

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