More than Academic?
I'm always a bit sceptical about academic studies of open source, since they tend to tell what you already knew, but five years late and dressed up in obfuscatory language. That said, there seems to be some genuine content in this specimen, entitled "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla". Worth a quick gander, at least. (Via AC/OS.)
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Hehe, now you are being about 5 years late:
They published the first csae stdy in 2000: A Case Study of Open Source Software Development: The Apache Server (2000) and the paper you refer to was published in 2002.
Actually, I half disagree with your assessment that academic papers on FOSS simply retell what's out there already. I agree that quite many clueless people published stuff on that, but on the the other hand many smart academics have published stuff which is nonintuitive. Besides the many tudies on motivation of developers, there are simlations out there when Win32 and when Linux will prevail in the market. Researchers have written about Knowledge Reuse which is hard in corporate settings but seems to work in the FOSS world. Technical studies comparing the modularity of closed source and open source projects...
But then, being a researcher, looking into the FOSS world, I am hardly unbiased.a1basti
Thanks for the information. Since the paper was marked "draft" I couldn't tell directly when it was written, but if I'd looked closely at the references I would have seen that they all stopped in 2000....
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