Abstract
Open source software is a digital artifact that people collaboratively develop. As open source has matured, corporations have started engaging with open source software development. Many corporations compete and collaborate within open source. To effectively work in such settings, corporations selectively collaborate on open source software development while at the same time attending to their own corporate competitive needs. This dissertation explores how corporations manage boundaries in their competitive and collaborative engagement in open-source software development, deciding what to keep proprietary for competitive reasons and what to contribute to open source for collaborative reasons. This dissertation uses the theoretical lens of boundary work (Langley et al., 2019) to explore competitive, collaborative, and configurational boundaries corporations adopt in their engagement in open source software development. Using an interpretive case study (Walsham, 1995), this dissertation studies a Linux Foundation project - Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL is the collaboration of competing corporations from the auto industry and other technology corporations serving the auto industry that mutually develop open source software for automobiles. The data for this dissertation was collected through field engagement by participating in AGL conferences, attending weekly meetings, and interviewing the developers and corporate employees contributing to AGL. The interview data was analyzed through qualitative coding to identify themes to understand different boundary work corporations adopt in their engagement with open source. This dissertation found that all three boundaries are interwoven, occur simultaneously, and influence each other. Further, this dissertation found that corporations manage competition and collaboration by collaborating on non-differentiating products they develop through open source and competing around the same product by providing value-added services. I named this boundary work “non-differentiating boundaries.” This dissertation also highlights evolving state of corporate-driven open source projects, which has changed from volunteer-driven participation to strategically started open source projects. Instead of voluntarily contributing technology, corporations financially support open source projects and guide them to hire contractors to develop open source technologies.