2016 Volume 15 Issue 5 Pages 239-250
The open source community (OSC) is a place to develop collective knowledge available to anyone, thereby inevitably engendering free riders. Despite this, many firms have contributed to OSCs. This study examines 10 Android smartphone manufacturers between 2010 and 2013 with regard to their (a) source code contributions and the relation of those contributions to (b) time to market as measured by the release of their first Android smartphones. The results of the analysis are divided into the following two groups: (A) a group that released smartphones faster than their competitors through source code contributions and (B) a group that made few source code contributions and was slower to release smartphones than group (A). In addition, in a few years, some firms were observed to have move from group (B) to group (A).