Open-source software offers free access to its source code. The open-source license permits users to copy, study, change, improve, and redistribute the code and software. As of November 2012, SourceForge, the largest hosting Web site for open-source projects, hosted 324,000 projects and had 3.4 million registered developers. Compare that figure to 250,000 projects and 2.7 million developers at the beginning of 2011.

Some projects succeed and create useful software, and are able to sustain growth and ongoing development; many others fail and are abandoned. This book tries to identify success factors and reasons for failure and abandonment, to gain a better understanding of Internet-based collaboration. The authors list more than 40 research questions, testable hypotheses on community and technological attributes, and institutional factors they used to conduct a comprehensive study on the factors that influence success or failure. They created multivariate statistical models of success and abandonment; analyzed the SourceForge data on more than 100,000 projects; and supplemented those findings with their own surveys and interviews with programmers. They discuss stakeholders, such as firms, governments, nonprofit organizations, universities, and scientific research organizations, and their motivations for participation. The authors turned to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), a nonprofit organization for open-source geographic information system (GIS) projects, to identify developers for the interviews and surveys. The book contains a detailed and comprehensive explanation of their research methodology. The data collected for the research is available on the companion Web site (http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/supplementary.html).

The authors offer guidelines and best practices for developers working on open-source projects. The book explains how the findings could be used to improve the success rates of other collaborative projects in the technical, social, and political fields. The book also provides design principles and guidelines for virtual collaboration, and explains how the presented information may help solve global problems.

This is a must-read for anyone involved in open-source projects and professionals who manage large projects with teams located in different parts of the world. The book would also be of interest to researchers--there are many outstanding questions that call out for further research and exploration--and people who manage complex projects in a variety of application domains.