Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Asparouhova

In the early 2000s, Yochai Benkler expanded upon Ostrom’s model by applying her findings to the online world. He terms this communal structure commons-based peer production (CBPP) in a 2002 essay called “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm.’” (The title is a reference to Linux’s mascot, which is a penguin; in the paper, Benkler leans heavily upon the example of open source software to make his case.) Benkler observed that people were collaborating online for seemingly no obvious reason beyond personal satisfaction. He tried to understand how and why people would do this outside of Coase’s firm (i.e., in their spare time), given that it should be more transactionally expensive.