A framework analysis of the open source software development paradigm

TLDR

Open Source Software has attracted commercial interest and shown promise in addressing the software crisis, yet rigorous academic research on it remains scarce. The study explores future directions for OSS research. A framework combining Zachman’s IS architecture and Checkland’s CATWOE was developed and applied to analyze the OSS paradigm.

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) has become the subject of much commercial interest of late. Certainly, OSS seems to hold much promise in addressing the core issues of the software crisis, namely that of software taking too long to develop, exceeding its budget, and not working very well. Indeed, there have been several examples of significant OSS success stories—the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the BIND domain name resolution utility, to name but a few. However, little by way of rigorous academic research on OSS has been conducted to date. In this study, a framework was derived from two previous frameworks which have been very influential in the IS field, namely that of Zachman’s IS architecture (ISA) and Checkland’s CATWOE framework from Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). The resulting framework is used to analyze the OSS approach in detail. The potential future of OSS research is also discussed.