Were such quaint notions remotely accurate, the bursting of the Internet bubble would have doomed geeks just as the Yucatan meteor annihilated dinosaurs. Fortunately, it was not romance that made Open Source software a pervasive business reality. Siobhán O’Mahony, an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Group at the Harvard Business School, has been researching Open Source as the true phenomenon it is but her line of enquiry cuts through the fog of romance. In short, O'Mahony has been studying Open Source community groups that have taken the road of more structured non-profit foundations. In doing so, she allows us to witness the I-Win-you-win-we-all-win negotiations and strategic dynamics that occur between Open Source developers and the business world as the latter adopt Open Source methods, forge Open Source alliances, and use Open Source software.

This behavioral lens comes none too soon. The ties between Open Source developers and corporations now require understanding different roles Open Source developers play and the groups to which they belong. “I do think that we need to expand our definition and construction of the types of corporate alliances that are possible and productive to include collaboration with collectives that identify with political or occupational norms and values,” she has stated.

But why have numerous Open Source organizations, including GNOME, FreeBSD,  KDE,  Perl, Python, and Linux Standards Base,  moved to form non-profit foundations? Since when do Open Source developers welcome formality in structure? O’Mahony notes the meteoric rise, success, and meteoric pressures, evidenced by Linux, in a short time frame, of Open Source, creating a lot of what-if scenarios for community groups all at once. How to define themselves before an ever-inquisitive press? How to enforce their community’s terms for software modification and distribution now that businesses were interested in using the software?

On the business side, there were problems too. Some companies weren’t even sure how to discuss alliances with these groups. She quotes one Fortune 100 executive who, wanting to structure a relationship with an Open Source project, said, “How do I make deal with a web page?”

Enter the non-profit foundation construct, which has proven its mettle in many obvious and not-so obvious ways. By assigning their intellectual property to a foundation, she says, Open Source developers garnered protection from individual liability and gained a means to represent the project. Protection from individual liability became more and more critical for Open Source developers, she says, as more people in the commercial world began using their work. Under a non-profit structure, they opened up new legal avenues to allow their intellectual property to be available yet governable. For business partners, collaboration between a firm and a more structured non-profit foundation eased concerns as well. The ever-present dangers, however, were that too much structure in the newer non-profits would  disenfranchise the very people who were making successful Open Source projects possible.

On the other hand, while thrilled to receive support from Fortune 500 firms in the software industry, no community-managed software project wants to be taken over or co-opted. As a result, these foundations can play a major role in sustaining pluralism in the project's governance. (It can be seductively easy to accept an influx of well-qualified volunteers from a single corporate benefactor.)

This kind of research puts Open Source in a particularly interesting light within academic circles—one can easily guess over at the departments of economics, to be exact. But O’Mahony, who’s been researching Open Source group structures, is not an economist. “I am a sociologist,” she asserts in an interview with Open, “and I do field work.”

Nonetheless, O'Mahony's work is on a convergence course with one of the critical questions being investigated by economists like Alan Greenspan: How to deal with the knowledge assets and economic goods driving the new economy that economists describe as soft or intangible." Long the accountant's equivalent of a 'miscellaneous' category, economic growth is now showing up in this intangible category and declining in the economic sector measured by official statistics.

The fraction of the economy for which productivity data can be deemed reasonably accurate is now pegged at less than 30%. As a result, economists need to resolve the issues surrounding knowledge assets and in particular resolve the type of good that software represents. Meanwhile, O'Mahony asks, "When a successful entrepreneur with every possible advantage chooses to found a non-profit instead of a firm, because this is more likely to lead to success, what can be inferred about the state of the software market?" Non-profit foundations are created, according to organizational theorists, to protect goods too valuable and socially desired to be left to the market. As a result, for sociologists there are definitive social consequences to the granting of special tax privileges to organizations that produce software, and policy makers need to be thinking about is just what type of good software represents.

While O'Mahony doubts that non-profit foundations will define the future of software development, she is confident that they will play an important role. The fall, the rise, the sustaining features of Open Source groupings have and will continue to affect the way technology products and services are made, distributed, and purchased. Which of the Open Source groups doing deals with firms will successfully sustain themselves in years to come will at least in part depend on the way they conduct their corporate alliances, leverage corporate support, and at the same time sustain their needs for independence and technology progress, unfettered by vendor-centric agenda. Along these lines, O'Mahony has the credentials to study the workings of Open Source group and business dynamics.

She received her doctorate from Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering. “At the school there is a small group of behavioral scientists who study technical workers and strategy.” Stanford was quite convinced early on, she said, “of the way technical work would be changing. It’s a special group at Stanford that I come from.” From their research pursuits, O’Mahony has steeped herself in research interests that surround management issues associated with technical labor forces, and new forms of organizing that promote innovation. 

The non-profit foundations proceed to make IP agreements with firms, and firms in turn have donated code to non-profit foundations for future development. In essence, to hear O’Mahony talking about foundation and corporate interactions, one realizes how short-sighted the old cartoon perceptions of what went on during the early days of Open Source really were. “I think what is important to consider is that people in these well-established projects have a lot of experience and maturity,” she says. Many of the people involved in these groups already had experience with standards groups and the IETF. 

 O’Mahony’s study discusses four projects: Debian, GNOME, Apache, and Linux Standards Base. “I was interested in projects that were mature and had received some degree of commercial attention but I wanted variance in the way projects were aligned with corporate interests.” Some of those observations:

Debian – One of the earliest projects to create a non-profit foundation, Software in the Public Interest, some Debian members were more resistant to incorporation and had greater concern about losing control over the project’s technical direction than in other projects. Some other leaders, concerned about liability, encouraged the members who were resisting to adapt the idea in its most minimal form. SPI is the least active of the three foundations under study, doing little more than “hold Debian’s assets.” Debian is also the only of three projects, Debian, GNOME, and Apache, where an internal project leader initiated incorporation. The other two (Apache and GNOME) had outside assistance—legal; Fortune 500 companies—for drafting their charters and thinking through governance issues.

Apache—She found the Apache group culture distinct, as many of the contributors worked in enterprise- building websites using the software for commercial purposes. The Apache group was one of the earlier s projects to be approached by a Fortune 500 firm for collaboration and the first project to create a foundation integrating project governance. Projects that followed often cited Apache’s foundation as an influential model.

Overall, O'Mahony finds a range of foundations emerging. At one end are non-profits acting as little more than legal shells to hold project assets and to collect donations. At the other end are non-profit foundations with more elaborate structures, some managing releases and hiring employees. Of course, one is tempted to find easy answers about which non-profit construct ensures the most success. But success in whose eyes? The success of any one foundation will appear to rest on the design that members can live with. Success will also rest on the degree to which the foundation/corporate symbiosis is mutually beneficial, and the degree to which each partner achieves a desired balance of community and corporate interests. Her research paves the way, nonetheless, in showing how today’s social movements can be a source of institutional change. She also intends to write a book that offers further research on the topic, she tells Open.