Paper Info
Title
"Cool" or "monster"?: company takeovers and their effect on open source community participation
Abstract
In this study, we investigate the effect of takeover announcements made by open-source software (OSS) steward firms, on participation in an OSS newcomers' online community. We examine a MySQL newcomer forum before and after two takeover announcements -- the January 2008 announcement of MySQL's takeover by Sun Microsystems, and the April 2009 announcement of Sun's takeover by Oracle. We find that the impact on participation depends on how the acquiring company is perceived. The announcement of an acquisition by a company perceived as hostile had a negative effect on participation, whereas announcement of acquisition by a more friendly company was found to have no effect on participation. These changes in participation occurred without any accompanying change in the product itself, or its licensing. This work provides the evidence of the effect of external events on online participation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/1940761.1940806
iConference 2011
Keywords
Field
DocType
open source community participation,external event,friendly company,takeover announcement,negative effect,mysql newcomer forum,sun microsystems,online community,online participation,company takeover,accompanying change,oss newcomer,oracle
Online community,Monster,Advertising,Community participation,Online participation,Oracle,Sun Microsystems,Open source software,Marketing,Business
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.44
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Aditya Johri118731.05
Oded Nov298463.88
Raktim Mitra361.88