Knowledge Management in Open Source Software Development: Identifying and Analyzing Knowledge Management Aspects of Practices in Open Source Software Development

Open source projects are often perceived as informal, even unmanaged. Still, they appear to manage knowledge acquisition and sharing sufficiently well to successfully develop software in such a distributed environment as the Internet. This work aims to explore that apparent contradiction, and thus complement the currently limited research in this field. Currently the field of knowledge management maintains several, partially opposing doctrines. Apart from the business aspect, two main schools of thought are present. The commodity school approaches knowledge as a universal truth, an object that can be separated from the knower. The community school emphasizes knowledge as something internal to the human mind, but which can be shared as experiences between people. In the analysis presented, we have applied an analysis method which considers both the commodity and the community perspectives. Our conclusions are that knowledge management indeed is present in open source projects, and that it is supported by an ecology like interaction of project practices.