The open source community is not governed by any central authority which represents its members or is entitled to decide and enforce any kind of rules. Therefore the open source community cannot be examined as an organization, but only as a social phenomenon including many different interacting organizations and individuals.
Without a central management the community depends significantly on social relations of the global Internet society. The resulting dependencies have a strong impact on activities inside the community and its interaction with the rest of the world. For this reason I tried to identify the major social structures by investigating various aspects of the community like economy, law, philosophy of science, politics, history and software engineering.
The examination has helped to gain a basic understanding of the open source phenomenon. In particular, the role of intellectual property and the special application of corresponding law by open source projects is the most important result. As the definition of the term 'open source software' is based on the attached licenses, they turned out to be the only reasonable indication to distinguish open source projects from other ones.
These open source licenses should be seen as the legal representation of more complex models. The subject of these models is software and all related issues like development or usage. Additionally, it is important to understand that each license is derived from different underlying principles that might belong to various categories like economy, philosophy or politics.
Therefore the open source phenomenon should not be considered as one united movement of any kind, but as a collection of many different thinking individuals and parties that have the same interest in a small field. When covering all participating parties, the only general agreement appears to be the acceptance of open source software as a useful thing. Actually, some parties seem to only tolerate open source software for the moment because it does more good than harm to their personal interests.
Open source projects (OSPs) as the organization form of software developers turned out to be the basic element of the social network of the community. Although many economical activities are based on project's results, OSPs themselves do not seem to follow economical principles for various reasons, e.g. the lack of business management. Considering OSPs as academic research appears to be a more suitable model.