Tipo de contratos en grandes proyectos industriales

Open Space was pioneered in 1985 at the Organization Transformation Con- ference as, out of an apparent free for all, the conference became self organ- ising after all the participants had made their wishes clear, establishing the ‘law of two feet’, where participants feel free to move towards what will best serve their needs (Owen, 2008). Extending these self-organising principles to the Internet, Albors et al. (2008) claim that the internet can enable the creation of ‘virtual collaborative structures’, which would need to be based on shared values and trust, ‘at the level of the individual for an online com- munity to be formed’ (Nolan et al., 2007, p. 53). In smaller open source software projects, governance becomes about ‘who has the right, recognized as legitimate by the community as a whole to redistribute modified versions

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of the software’ (Weber 2004, p. 161). This view of governance in open source is one where the boundaries of an open source project are fluid rather than formal.

Open source as fluid boundaries enables a flow of resources for knowledge collaboration in a dynamic space rather than as a structural mechanism for organising (Faraj et al., 2011). In open source, the software architect shapes the boundaries of the project through the contributions they accept to the software code. In this boundary shaping activity, the software architect works towards a goal that is shared with contributors, to create software for a particular purpose. In this goal setting, the software architect, defining the space that contributors work in, exerts invisible power relations (Weber, 2004). The overall process followed by the software architect fulfils Simon’s observation in the context of computing that the ‘question is how to build a reliable system from unreliable parts’ (1969, p. 19), the software architect selects and assembles the reliable parts from those offered by contributors.

What may be unique about open source is that the software code itself is a narrative that forms the boundary of the project. This software code is itself a form of language that communicates to a computer system how to perform a particular task, where this language enables construction of meaning to both the computer system and to the individuals contributing software code. Taking a view of open source as a narrative, it is more of an adhocracy than a democracy, based on semiformal decentralised struc- tures (Konieczny, 2010) in an open system (Aksulu and Wade, 2010). In this respect, open source may be able to overcome the issues with governance within a commons identified by Ostrom (2010), in particular free-riding and collective choice in decision making.

3.6.5

Open source as a narrative

The notion of open source as a narrative has been investigated by relatively few authors. Drawing on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, von Krogh et al. (2012, p. 650) identify in the context of open source software that ‘human behavior cannot be decoupled from ethical considerations about what people strive for and the narratives they construct about their life’. This narrative can be seen in terms of an improvised performance, where the developing software code ‘must be constantly negotiated and constructed from moment to moment’ (Chopra and Dexter, 2007, p. 107). Weber offers an interesting perspective on open source organisational forms as ‘social constructivist nar- ratives’, where power relations are embodied in software code, and can be

3.6. OPEN SOURCE AS A NARRATIVE 73

analysed from that code (2004, p. 133). These views on open source as a nar- rative can be evaluated by considering open source in terms of the narrative framework offered in Section 3.4.4:

1. Purposeful intent: Open source projects are created through an intent to fulfil a particular purpose (Hars and Ou, 2002). Contributors partic- ipate in open source software projects from both intrinsic motivations towards ‘socially meaningful participation’ (Bach and Twidale, 2010, p. 70) and extrinsic motivations of enhanced career prospects (Krishna- murthy, 2006) and fulfilling personal needs (Hars and Ou, 2002). 2. Enacted by human or other actors: Creating computer software is a

process of writing, which can be compared to the writing of poetry or other creative works (Chopra and Dexter, 2007). In the case of soft- ware, the process of writing enacts the software code into being, capa- ble of performing a useful task.

3. Particular incidents or events: Open source as a narrative of the code itself and discussion around it (Weber, 2004), is focused on the devel- opment of a particular software project.

4. Causal sequence: The development of open source software can be seen as a causal sequence in two respects. The first is that open source soft- ware follows an established sequence of identification of needs, then a community of developers forms, coordinated by the software architect to produce software that can meet that need (Weber, 2004). The sec- ond is that the software code itself must follow a causal algorithmic sequence in order to work (Chopra and Dexter, 2007).

5. Reflect reality and create it: The software code is a form of language, which in turn can create a structure of shared meaning (Holzscheiter, 2005) in the software code itself. This structure of shared meaning reflects the reality of the software code. Open source follows a peer review process of continually finding faults and fixing them through a process of ‘continuous criticism of existing versions and a rapid feed- back’ (Lee and Cole, 2003, p. 643), re-creating the reality of the code. 6. Context: Open source software licences such as the General Public Li-

cence create a framework for developing open source software projects (DiBona et al., 1999; Weber, 2004). However, these projects remain rel- atively unstructured compared to closed source software projects (Ak- sulu and Wade, 2010).

74 CHAPTER 3. LITERATURE REVIEW

7. Specific point of view: The motivations of software developers are pri- marily intrinsic (Krishnamurthy, 2006; Bitzer et al., 2007; Bach and Twidale, 2010), arising from their inner lives, including a wish for per- sonal development (Aksulu and Wade, 2010). These motivations lead to a specific point of view on how an open source software project should evolve, including that open source is about gaining power by giving away (Bergquist and Ljungberg, 2001).

8. New point of view: An open source community is one that ‘makes it- self through hacking practices of sharing, circulation, and the constant transformation of things’ (Delgado, 2013, p. 66), in this case the soft- ware code itself is transformed.

9. Become institutionalised: User communities develop around open source projects that become institutionalised through group intentions, fa- cilitated by shared narratives (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006). Open source projects can work with firms through boundary organisations (O’Mahony and Bechky, 2008).

This section has introduced open source as a narrative, where an individual software developer’s imagination creates a vision for software that solves a problem or fulfils a need. Weber (2004, p. 15) highlights that it is ‘ideas rather than technology’ that were behind both the first and second indus- trial revolutions, and also behind open source, giving the latter political and economic dimensions. These dimensions imply that open source could be applied to other contexts, particularly to business.

Open source has been linked with business by a number of authors (Shah, 2006; O’Mahony, 2007; Dahlander and Magnusson, 2008), particularly thro- ugh open innovation (Philbin, 2014; Hossain and Anees-ur-Rehman, 2016; Chesbrough, 2017). In particular open source and open innovation can in- spire new business models (Chang et al., 2007; Rajala et al., 2012; Benyayer and Kupp, 2017). This linking of open source to business models via open innovation suggests that if open source can be considered as a narrative, business models could also be considered as a narrative. The next section introduces business models and frames them as narratives.