On OSS Foundation Community Services

Open source software (OSS) communities are forms of inter-organizational collaborative ecosystems. In case an OSS community is successful and the project grows, there is a need for institutionalization to involve outside parties. The OSS community face a choice of how to organize the community. Either they continue as is, join an existing foundation or they found their own foundation. In this tentative paper, we are going to show that a major motivation why communities join a foundation is due to the related services the foundation provides to them. We structure the provided services in regard to our organizational framework. While some foundations provide services across all three dimensions, other foundations set a clear focus on financial services.