Cui Bono: Do open source software incubator policies and procedures benefit the projects or the incubator?

# Description

Open-Source Software Foundations are becoming an increasingly important part of the OSS system, providing economies of scale by bringing many projects under the same umbrella and provisioning services (e.g., legal) that are not specialties of OSS developers. These Foundations have typically arisen to provide support to a key project, and have grown to take in and support more projects along the way. As such, the policies that guide the interactions of the Foundation and projects have been built incrementally over time. We describe a new method that allows us to examine a multi-party policy regime to determine the distribution of costs and benefits in the regime and explore which parties may be benefiting at the expense of others. We apply this method to the study of the ASF, one of the premier OSS Foundations.

# Findings

We find that the costs and benefits of policies in the ASF Incubator are distributed in a balanced way between ASF and projects, indicating that no party bears the cost of benefitting the other. We describe many alternative distributions of costs and benefits and what that would imply for the contribution of a Foundation to the OSS public good and common-pool resource of contributor energy. We argue that the distribution of policies between ASF and its projects mean that ASF is helping grow both the public good and the common-pool resource.

# Paper

The paper can be found here.