Open-coopetition in the PC and mobile industries: the WebKit case

TL;DR

This study investigates the collaborative and competitive dynamics within the WebKit open-source project in the PC and mobile industries, using social network analysis and virtual ethnography to visualize its evolution and reveal insights about coopetition.

Contribution

It combines social network analysis with virtual ethnography to analyze the evolution of WebKit's collaboration network, providing new insights into open-source coopetition dynamics.

Findings

Confirmed established coopetition theories in open-source context

Revealed that not all coopetition propositions are universally applicable

Visualized WebKit's evolution through temporal social network analysis

Abstract

In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards geographically-distributed software development teams is being challenged by collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. While practitioners move with difficulties towards globally distributed software development, there is a lack of research addressing the collaboration dynamics of large-scale distributed software projects. More particularly, even if there are empirical manifestations of collaboration among software-houses that market rival-software products within the same market, there is a clear lack of research addressing the development of information systems by coopetitive manners. While addressing a previous call for the advancement of methods and techniques to support the visualization of temporal aspects to represent change and evolution in ecosystems, we combined and virtual-ethnography (VA) with a Social Network Analysis (SNA) over publicly-available and naturally-occurring data that allowed us to re-construct and visualize the evolution of the WebKit collaboration in a sequence of networks. We started by screening, publicly available data such as company announcements, financial reports and specialized-press that allowed us to gain insights of the industrial context. After attaining a better understanding of the the competitive dynamics of the mobile-devices and PC industries, we started extracting and analyzing the social network of the WebKit community leveraging SNA, which is an emergent method widely established across disciplines of social sciences in general.Our case confirmed much of the established literature on coopetition, but more detailed observations revealed that not all coopetition theoretical propositions can be generalized to the open-source arena.