Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Information Systems Journal

Abstract

Corporations increasingly engage with open source software communities in the co‐creation of software. This collaboration between corporate professionals and open source software community members is strikingly different from the early days of software development where for‐profit firms attempted to dominate and control the industry while attempting to throttle the success of independent developers offering an alternative, open source option. While many metaphors like trading zones, common pool resources and ecosystems have helped understand the phenomenon, the metaphors do not portray what the industry was like before and after the transition. We adopt a postcolonial metaphor as an analytical lens to examine such collaboration based on qualitative data gathered over three years from executives, managers and developers within corporations that engage in open source software development. Drawing on these insights, we then theorize a “Third Design Space,” based on the concept of the third space proposed by Bhabha. This metaphor encourages the cultivation of a new design environment, creation of new design associations and circulation of shared design resources. Together these practices and behaviours make it possible to nurture innovative methods and new rituals for designing software with results and methods that represent a distinct departure from the competitive and proprietary past, even creating innovative artefacts that could not have been created without the Third Design Space.

Comments

© 2019 The Authors.

https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12270

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS
 

Funded by the University of Nebraska at Omaha Open Access Fund