Open source software communities are one of the most successful-and least understood-examples of high-performance collaboration and community-building on the Internet today. Other types of communities could benefit enormously from understanding how open source communities work.

This report describes what open source communities are and how they work. In particular, it addresses the following questions: What is the open source landscape as a whole? How many projects exist, what kinds of software do these projects develop, and how many people are involved with these projects? What are the demographics of those who participate in these communities? Why do they join, and how long do they stay? How do they interact with each other? How do open source communities work? What are the patterns of collaboration within successful open source communities?

In examining these questions, this report discusses existing, relevant research, and presents original case studies of two open source projects: TouchGraph and SquirrelMail.

This report was sponsored by the Omidyar Foundation. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. >from *An Introduction to Open Source Communities*. april, 2003

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