🤖 AI Summary
Existing research often treats open-source software as a homogeneous entity, overlooking its inherent heterogeneity in objectives, governance, and funding, which leads to unwarranted generalizations. Addressing this gap, this study conducts a multi-source, lightweight systematic literature review of 3,925 papers to develop the first taxonomy of open-source software comprising 14 distinct subtypes. It further proposes an integrative analytical framework that combines driving factors, governance models, and funding sources. The research identifies theoretically significant yet empirically underexplored categories—such as “multi-corporate coopetition” and “protest software”—and maps a comprehensive typology encompassing both mature and emerging subtypes. This work establishes a foundational basis for future research on differentiated dynamics and cross-type transferability within the open-source ecosystem.
📝 Abstract
Open source software (OSS) is not homogeneous. A project's purpose, governance, and funding shape how its community forms, who contributes, and how the software is maintained, yet empirical research often samples OSS broadly and reports findings as if they held for open source as a whole. We argue that OSS comprises distinguishable sub-genres, and that the sub-genre a study samples bounds how far its findings generalize. Using a light, multi-source review that screens 3,925 unique papers, we synthesize a typology of fourteen OSS sub-genres, from well-studied ones such as community-driven, company-backed, foundation-governed, research and scientific, and open source for social good (OSS4SG), to under-studied ones such as multi-company co-opetition, protestware, and open-source appropriate technology. We place the sub-genres in a framework that records each one's primary driver, governance, and funding, with its maturity in the literature and representative projects, and we present a research agenda whose central question is whether findings established on one sub-genre transfer to others. The contribution is the typology and the agenda rather than a complete census, and we mark the sub-genres whose empirical support is thin.