Essence of Distributed Work: The Case of the Linux Kernel

By Jae Yun Moon, Lee S. Sproull. First Monday, 2000

383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides a historical account of how the Linux operating system kernel was developed from three different perspectives. Each focuses on different critical factors in its success at the individual, group, and community levels. The technical and management decisions of Linus Torvalds the individual were critical in laying the groundwork for a collaborative software development project that has lasted almost a decade. The contributions of volunteer programmers distributed worldwide enabled the development of an operating system on the par with proprietary operating systems. The Linux electronic community was the organizing structure that coordinated the efforts of the individual programmers. The paper concludes by summarizing the factors important in the successful distributed development of the Linux kernel, and the implications for organizationally managed distributed work arrangements.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems and Management, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc7e250d77810a252cc945449554bf93c4feb36d

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Citations in the corpus

Incomplete by Design and Designing for Incompleteness (2008, background): “In addition, these individuals developed new features for the nascent operating system that, in turn, became the basis for future directions along which the system evolved (Moon and Sproull 2000).”
The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community (2007, background): “Preliminary fieldwork also revealed that the Debian community had, unlike other open source projects previously examined (e.g. Raymond, 1999; Moon and Sproull, 2002; Lee and Cole, 2003), experienced frequent ` leadership turnover since the founder left the project in 1996.”
Open Source Software and the "Private-Collective" Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science (2003, neutral): “It also has been observed in areas ranging from industrial equipment innovations and closed source software developed by firms to sporting equipment innovations developed by individual end consumers (Allen 1983, Morrison et al. 2000, Harhoff et al. 2000, Franke and Shah 2001).”
Striking a balance between trust and control in a virtual organization: a content analysis of open source software case studies (2001, background): “Moon & Sproull (2000) elaborated on the control patterns within the Linux community: Because the Linux-kernel mailing list is the central organizing forum for kernel developers and supports a very heavy volume of message trafﬁc, people need a clear understanding of how to contribute to the list.”
Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel (2003, background): “Interestingly, most of these principles are similarly considered as structural pre-conditions for successful distributed work in business organizations (e.g., Duarte & Snyder, 1999; Lipnack & Stamps, 1997).”
Managing virtual teams: A review of current empirical research (2005, background): “However, although some examples of highly self-organized virtual collaboration exist (Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003; Moon & Sproull, 2002), researchers agree that most virtual teams need some guidance and managerial support beyond the mere provision of an electronic groupware system (Duarte &…”
The social structure of free and open source software development (2005, background): “1998; Gacek et al., 2001; Moon & Sproull, 2000; Mockus et al., 2002).”
Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis (2005, background): “Such studies reveal a pattern of community organization that we could characterize as a series of concentric circles, each occupied by people playing a particular role in the development process (Moon and Sproull, 2000; Maas, 2004).”
From a Firm-Based to a Community-Based Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development (2003, background): “Markus, et al., 2000; Moon & Sproull, 2002 ) have adopted the perspectives of labor economics,”
Why Do Users Contribute to Firm-Hosted User Communities? The Case of Computer-Controlled Music Instruments (2006, background): “Furthermore, collaborative work on software is favored by the ease with which the product (code) can be passed around among developers, as observed in other cases of distributed innovation processes such as open source software projects (Moon and Sproull 2000, Lakhani and von Hippel 2003).”
Technology- and Product-Oriented Movements: Approximating Social Movement Studies and Science and Technology Studies (2005, background): “The lack of backup support led to a culture of sharing bug fixes among university participants (Moon and Sproull 2002).”
Voluntary Engagement in an Open Web-Based Encyclopedia: Wikipedians and Why They Do It (2009, background): “Unlike other voluntary collaboration projects on the Internet, such as free and open source software development projects (eg, Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003 ; Moon & Sproull, 2002 ), Wikipedia has no established public recognition system (“credit files”; cf.”
Free revealing and the private-collective model for innovation incentives (2006, background): “In addition, individual benefits in open source software projects have been tied to participation in communities surrounding the projects as opposed to simple free riding (Raymond, 1999; Moon and Sproull, 2000; Wayner, 2000; O’ Mahoney, 2003; von Krogh et al., 2003).”