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This paper categorizes open source software (OSS) into fourteen distinct sub-genres based on their purpose, governance, and funding, highlighting the implications for empirical research that often treats OSS as a monolithic entity. By conducting a comprehensive review of 3,925 papers, the authors argue that the sub-genre sampled in studies significantly influences the generalizability of findings. The resulting typology not only clarifies the diversity within OSS but also sets forth a research agenda to explore the transferability of insights across these sub-genres.
OSS research may be misleading if it ignores the diverse sub-genres that shape governance and community dynamics.
Open source software (OSS) is not homogeneous. A project's purpose, governance, and funding shape how its community forms, who contributes, and how the software is maintained, yet empirical research often samples OSS broadly and reports findings as if they held for open source as a whole. We argue that OSS comprises distinguishable sub-genres, and that the sub-genre a study samples bounds how far its findings generalize. Using a light, multi-source review that screens 3,925 unique papers, we synthesize a typology of fourteen OSS sub-genres, from well-studied ones such as community-driven, company-backed, foundation-governed, research and scientific, and open source for social good (OSS4SG), to under-studied ones such as multi-company co-opetition, protestware, and open-source appropriate technology. We place the sub-genres in a framework that records each one's primary driver, governance, and funding, with its maturity in the literature and representative projects, and we present a research agenda whose central question is whether findings established on one sub-genre transfer to others. The contribution is the typology and the agenda rather than a complete census, and we mark the sub-genres whose empirical support is thin.
