# Collaboration in the open-source arena: The WebKit case

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.5996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The AI Community Building the Future? A Quantitative Analysis of Development Activity on Hugging Face Hub](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13058/) (2024)
- [Why Companies "Democratise" Artificial Intelligence: The Case of Open Source Software Donations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17876/) (2024)
- [Characterising Open Source Co-opetition in Company-hosted Open Source Software Projects: The Cases of PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18241/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards distributed software development teams is being challenged by emerging collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. In this paper, we explore the collaboration networks in the WebKit open-source project, by mining WebKit's source-code version-control-system data with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Our approach allows us to observe how key events in the mobile-device industry have affected the WebKit collaboration network over time. With our findings, we show the explanation power from network visualizations capturing the collaborative dynamics of a high-networked software project over time; and highlight the power of the open-source fork concept as a nexus enabling both features of competition and collaboration. We also reveal the WebKit project as a valuable research site manifesting the novel notion of open-coopetition, where rival firms collaborate with competitors in the open-source community.