Identities for upstream value creation: the case of open-source software communities Open Access

Open-source software (OSS) describes IT-solutions based on freely available code (Chawner, 2012; Pal et al., 2024). It is based on the idea that cooperation and free access foster developments (Stallman, 2002). Communities are at the heart of such developments. They consist of individuals who contribute to the creation and improvement of software (Lindberg et al., 2024b), typically motivated by non-monetary goals (von Krogh et al., 2012).

While early ideas promoted entirely free contribution and user systems, arguments soon emerged that companies could benefit from such business models (Raymond, 2001). Quality issues arising from deficient or faulty coding, and how the software would profit from someone making decisions, provided further justification (Alqahtani, 2025; Song and Zhu, 2026). Such ideas describe a company – an OSS vendor – as the motor for the software, while developments are distributed in the OSS community (Safadi et al., 2025; Iyer et al., 2026). This way of designing OSS developments depicts the raw model for open innovations and crowdsourcing (Ghezzi et al., 2018).

In addition to the community and vendor, users may also partly be developers (von Krogh et al., 2003). They are driven by the synergic role of improving the software while using it, provided that it aligns with users' preferences and offers advantages over available alternatives (Spinellis and Giannikas, 2012).

While OSS may be organised across communities, users, and vendors, OSS innovations thus depend on the community in terms of both attracting contributors and keeping them innovative. In this article, we posit that the identity of the OSS community is pivotal in these choices. Identity not only facilitates non-monetary, intrinsic motivations for joining, but also explains why individuals remain in communities through a collective sense of belonging. Furthermore, identity plays a central role in coordinating members within such communities.

Identity is a multidisciplinary concept. Marketing literature has argued for the identity's role in the process of attracting customers. Organisational theory depicts identity as unifying values formed by the interaction of individuals. When synthesised across disciplines, identity can be understood as the perceived and desirable characteristics of a party (individual or organisation) that may mutually transcend across parties once they become associated with one another (Ashforth and Schinoff, 2016). The desirable dimension concerns how identity is communicated as a means of positioning oneself. Meanwhile, transcendability describes how a party joining an organisation or group may influence the collective's identity and, in turn, be shaped by the association. In the context of OSS, identity is expectedly shaped and reshaped by contributing parties, while also mutually affected by OSS vendors and users.

Through integrating identity across disciplines, we highlight the dual role of identity related to communities in attracting and maintaining contributors when these are not foremost driven by monetary return and need to effectively coexist with users and vendors. The purpose of the article is to describe and discuss the role of identity in OSS innovations. We ask: In what ways do the identities of communities, vendors and users contribute to the innovative outcomes of OSS communities?

By examining the interconnections between identity as understood and shaped by contributors and as communicated to and by others, we emphasise: (1) how the communicated identity influences how it is perceived by its constituents; (2) how the way the community is perceived is a consequence of its contributors and (3) how identity functions as an important mechanism for value creation in non-market-driven environments.

The article contributes to research on communities by focusing on how they attract their contributors and keep them innovative, thereby introducing identity as an alternative mechanism for value creation in collaborative, non-market-driven environments. Our focus thereby complements past research on OSS communities (Shah, 2006; Imtiaz et al., 2024; Okong'o and Ndiege, 2025), while highlighting the important aspect of how shared values are built and communicated in open systems. Notably, we extend the discussion from non-monetary (von Krogh et al., 2012; Brunswicker and Haefliger, 2025) to intrinsic motivations, and from initial participation in communities (Fu, 2025) to continuous, collective contributions.

The article in that way addresses aspects relevant beyond OSS (Chiu et al., 2019; Pan, 2020) and for collective actions, social sustainability and related system-level operations, while linking to and expanding the recent debate on identity in communities (Wang et al., 2022, 2023).

The notion of a dual identity that brings together insights from multiple academic disciplines extends previous identity research towards an interdisciplinary commonality. It demonstrates how identities operate both internally and externally to guide behaviour and generate legitimacy within a broader context.

Literature on OSS has detailed innovative output, organisation and governance (Shah, 2006; Pal et al., 2024). The literature on innovation output has largely concentrated on measurement approaches (Korkmaz et al., 2024), relating innovation either to macroeconomic indicators (Blind and Schubert, 2024) or creativity (Lindberg et al., 2024a).

Research on organisation and governance addresses task distribution among communities, vendors and users, and vendor control of the community (cf. Koch et al., 2025; Zaggl et al., 2026). In business models such as those suggested by Raymond (2001), the OSS vendor appears as a separate party. These vendors see the benefits of the OSS as their access to development, while they provide structure, control the development, and represent the financial claims of the OSS (Pal et al., 2024).

According to Lerner and Tirole (2002), OSS vendors may live symbiotically with an OSS project and provide service to it, may release the code, or act as intermediates. Dahlander and Magnusson (2005) describe the community-vendor relationship as symbiotic, commensalistic or parasitic. This highlights how the vendor, although providing structure and making decisions, may simultaneously exploit the community by leveraging developers' competence and willingness to contribute, and by retaining for itself the generated income.

This reflects a tension between developers' intrinsic motivations and vendors' predominantly extrinsic, financial motives for engaging in OSS – a tension that may, in turn, manifest in reduced commitment and continuity among developers. However, it also illustrates that connections between vendors and the communities vary across OSS operations, making such tensions more or less pronounced.

As mentioned in the introduction, users can either overlap with developers or be entirely separate. Overlaps help explain developers' contributions – since they benefit personally from their work – and provide insight into user needs and potential improvements.

The tension between communities and vendors is a critical component of OSS. Other tensions include decisions on solutions that balance user needs and desirabilities, conflicts between users and contributors, and the trade-offs between voluntary contributions and professionalisation. This ultimately reflects the balance between the freedom of contribution and the scale and scope of operations. Together, these tensions illustrate that organising across vendors, communities and users is far from straightforward or uncontroversial.

While past OSS research has focused on innovation output, organisation and governance (e.g. Shah, 2006; Pal et al., 2024), it remains limited in explaining what motivates innovation within communities. Researchers such as von Krogh et al. (2012) and Daniel et al. (2025) have described motives for joining communities, including propensities for future employment, personal benefits from using developed solutions and recognition. These non-monetary, yet extrinsic, motives are individual rather than community-based. They can therefore not fully account for value creation at the community level. It is in this context that we highlight the dual role of identity as a key driver of community-level innovation, while also moving into intrinsic motivations.

To build on the discussion of identity from the introduction, identity possesses both inward-looking and outward-communicating dimensions, which are for the most part treated separately in organisational and marketing literature, respectively. The values emphasised in organisational identity are distinct, separable from other firms' values, shared among organisational members and formed by interaction processes (Albert and Whetten, 1985). They guide decisions and developments of the organisation. Such identity is collective in that it incorporates its different members' understanding of the organisation as a social construct and themselves as part of it (Ashforth and Mael, 1996).

Researchers such as Brown (2006) have discussed whether an organisation actually carries an identity, or if it is only the association with it that makes its members consider it so and change their self-perception as a consequence. While these arguments are matters of scientific viewpoints, they are relevant to discuss in relation to OSS communities.

Corporate identity in marketing literature denotes identity as communicated to others (Alsem and Kostelijk, 2008). In its marketing efforts, the corporate identity is perceived by such external parties as customers, but would also be pivotal in attracting employees (Mukherjee, 2008), or as suggested in this article: contributors in an OSS community.

While the corporate identity is ascribed to an organisation, it is individual in terms of perception. Indeed, while the values attributed to an organisation make it distinguishable from other parties, and aim to grasp the core of the entity they describe, the identity changes as firms pursue new activities, associate with new parties or reputation-wise are challenged with news about the firm (Öberg et al., 2011).

The organisational identity is greatly impacted by its contributing actors in such processes, while their association and disassociation with the company may well follow from its changed identity, thereby denoting the dual role of identity, acknowledged once linking together research on organisational and corporate identity.

Past research on identity in OSS has tended to focus on how the OSS movement was shaped at a macro level (Jain et al., 2023), portraying it as the emergence of an identity linked to what could be described as a new informal institutional logic (Öberg, 2023). Bagozzi and Dholakia (2006) examined whether such an identity influences user participation in a community, showing that experience moderates this relationship.

At the community level, Zhou (2020) demonstrates how users' social identity, arising from their collaboration, affects their willingness to contribute. Relatedly, Choi et al. (2005) point to socialisation leading to legitimisation and identification among contributors as a key variable for OSS development. Spaeth et al. (2015) connect contributors' social identification to the credibility and openness of sponsoring firms. Meanwhile, Fang and Neufeld (2009) show that learning and identity are positively associated with contributors' continued engagement within a community (cf. Kaushik and Chahal, 2026).

Taken together, identity in prior OSS research is either conceptualised at the macro level – as the identity of a broader movement – or treated in a manner that aligns with organisational identity (cf. Rieger et al., 2024), typically linking it to processes of learning and experience, while leaving several perspectives uncovered.

As argued in this article, identity plays a broader range of roles. It does so related to the dual role of identity – to attract contributors and to maintain them, and to how identity reciprocally reflects across entities and individuals. Meanwhile, identity is not well captured as being reciprocally constructed between individuals and organisations, and in the case of OSS across communities, vendors, and users in these dimensions. However, individual contributions would, for instance, be expected to become dependent on other parties' efforts, while potentially also shaped by the OSS vendor's relation to the community (cf. Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005). The belonging and self-reflexibility of the identity, including visibility and self-fulfilment (Raymond, 2001), furthermore construct important incentives for contribution. Identity can thereby integrate commercial and non-market, and importantly, the not well-captured intrinsic, motivations for joining and remaining in a community. This is well aligned with the fact that OSS communities – and similar arrangements beyond OSS – operate according to rationales other than purely monetary returns. By bringing together these perspectives, this article asks: In what ways do the identities of communities, vendors and users contribute to the innovative outcomes of OSS communities?

The study of identity and its impacting powers requires a method that brings attention to details, allows for the study of interconnectivity among parties and identities developed, and enables an explorative approach in data collection and analysis. For these reasons, the empirical part of this article relies on the case study methodology.

For theorising purposes (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007) and based on how the interconnections across vendors, community and users may differ (cf. Lerner and Tirole, 2002; Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005), a multi-case study approach was adopted. Individual cases thereby contribute distinct insights while enabling cross-case confirmation (Miles and Huberman, 1984). The use of complementary cases was intended to generate findings that are likely to be replicated across OSS communities beyond those examined here.

Cases were selected according to three dimensions: scale of operations, geographical context and governance type. Based on these criteria, the specific cases were chosen from among well-known OSS communities, supplemented by existing contacts.

To shortly outline the cases: Cendio is a Swedish small-scale, privately owned firm that early focused on packaged solutions based on free software. The vendor makes its earnings from subscriptions to software provided through its website, training of partners and users, and support services. As an OSS vendor, Cendio retains a high degree of control over its development projects. It relies on a combination of OSS communities and developers hired by the vendor. The vendor maintains the intellectual property rights (IPR) for developed software. Users are mainly public organisations, including healthcare providers, that rarely engage in the development projects. To attain user evaluations, Cendio has founded a separate user community. Representatives of large customer organisations mainly see their participation in the user community as part of their original tasks and do not associate themselves strongly with the community.

MySQL is a large Swedish company owned by Oracle. It launched the database product and an OSS community with the same name as the firm: MySQL. Its earnings come from software products, training, consultancy and support services. MySQL is heavily oriented to open source, and the management team of the vendor keeps close contacts with the community. However, development is largely pursued by the vendor, and it maintains the IPR. The community consists of developers who act locally. They have annual meetings and thereby get to know one another, which creates the sense of a physical community. To the vendor, the community has three purposes: brand recognition, quality assurance and a basis for recruitment. Based on how the community shares its name with the vendor, the vendor has been blamed for certain delivery mistakes of the community, and vice versa. Users are divided into free-riders and paying companies. Some of the customer companies create solutions on the database that they sell to others.

CodeWeavers was founded as a small-scale US company to early engage in the OSS Wine project. This project created the basis for CodeWeavers' recruitment of most of its staff and focuses its efforts on Windows software compatibility with such systems as Linux. Developments of the vendor and the community have gone from a focus on Windows applications to such ones in Mac-environments. The vendor provides three different products generated from the OSS community: CrossOver Games, CrossOver Linux and CrossOver Mac. It obtains its revenues from licenses and service agreements. In its relation to the community, CodeWeavers hands the code developed back to the community and thereby does not itself maintain the IPR, while it pursues some quality controls. Competences and developments of skills are central for parties contributing to the community. Users are private persons and firms acting in such product niches as film production, high-technology solutions and higher education. Most customers are Mac-users. While some of the private persons overlap with the community developers, paying firms are separate from it. They can vote for different applications, while they do not constitute a separate user community.

Red Hat is a large US vendor. It early adopted a business model based on OSS communities. This followed from assumptions about the OSS business model, leading to innovative and competitive solutions, and that it links the company to paying customers when these become part of the community. Subscriptions and services constitute the firm's main income sources. As for IPR, these are not owned by the vendor. Instead, Red Hat has co-founded the patent pool Open Invention Network to handle mutually owned patents among firms. The main product is based on community-owned IPR. The vendor promotes freedom of work for its employed and voluntary (non-paid) contributors in the communities. Early development was marked by continuous changes and updates, which were difficult for customer companies to handle. To come to terms with these problems, Red Hat launched a Linux product with a longer lifecycle, parallel to one that continued with the more frequent updates. The more closed and controlled product however had negative implications as it shut out developers. Users are mainly large customer companies in such different sectors as consumer products, finance and governments. The company combines a solution distributed through subscriptions with a beta-version freely accessible to users and developers. Red Hat promotes the customers' active participation and their creativity. Users contribute through testing of solutions, and in the innovation processes.

The data collection combined interviews, participatory research and secondary data. Nineteen interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview technique. Interviewees were selected to represent vendors, communities and users in each case. On the vendor side, participants held senior or middle-management positions, allowing the capturing of both strategic and operational perspectives. Community contributors were chosen across different projects and ranged from newcomers to individuals with several years of development experience. Users were community-based, overlapping or separate from the community.

Across the interviewees, there was a predominance of men, with an average age of around thirty, reflecting the demographic composition typical of OSS contributors. For confidentiality purposes, all interviewees were anonymised, and ethical approval for the study was obtained prior to data collection. Consent was ensured during each interview through ensuring willingness to participate and providing summary reflections for the interviewee to reflect on. It was also captured afterwards through the provision of notes or transcripts, which the interviewee could contest. Ethical considerations are reflected in the maintenance of anonymity, the aggregation of data in reporting and the exclusion of personal details. They are also reflected in the design of the interview questions, which focused on OSS-related issues rather than sensitive personal or other vulnerable topics.

A thematic interview template ( Supplementary Material) was developed and tailored to each interviewee. The interview themes addressed how the community operated, issues relating to IPR, the intensity of innovation and the distribution of tasks between the vendor, the community and users. They also covered how the community was marketed, the reasons for joining it, self- and community-descriptions, and whether the interviewees had experienced changes, doubts or strengthened commitment since joining.

The participatory research consisted of one of the authors' nine-year work experience in an OSS vendor. Such pre-understanding is inherently sensitive in social sciences, and we sought to leverage it to advance knowledge while minimising potential biases in the analysis of findings. Consequently, in relation to the data collection, it provided an understanding of the OSS context, guided the development of insightful interview questions and facilitated access to the case vendors by demonstrating prior familiarity with the field.

Secondary data provided timelines, verification and complemented the perspectives given by interviewees and consisted of press releases and newspaper items, amounting to approximately 500 items.

The analysis began with the creation of case drafts to capture the characteristics of each OSS community. In parallel, the data were systematically analysed across sources for each case. To reduce the potential pre-assumptive biases, the development of codes was carried out without the participation of the author, who had previous OSS experience. Empirical codes were generated through open coding to produce first-order concepts (Gioia et al., 2013). These codes were content-driven, aiming to capture each community's unique ways of presenting itself, its innovativeness and how it was perceived by its constituents. These codes were kept as verbal descriptions and separated across vendors, communities and users for each case.

Subsequently, to develop second-order themes (Gioia et al., 2013), the data were interpreted in light of conceptualisations of corporate and organisational identity. Comparisons were performed between how contributors in the communities, employees of the vendors and users described themselves, and how they as organisations were referred to by the other parties. Although the analysis was conducted using a cross-case approach, with codes compared and refined through iterative cycles (Pratt, 2009), each code remained linked to its individual case to allow for backtracking and contextualisation.

Aggregate dimensions were then derived from the interconnections among codes related to corporate and organisational identity, as well as innovativeness. It encompassed the conceptualisation of co-identity and spill-over identity, their connections to innovativeness and, through backward tracing, their relation to the organisation of and between vendors, communities and users.

As the final step of the analysis, findings were compared with previous research to ensure theoretical consistency, identification of gaps and integration with existing OSS and identity literatures.

The four OSS communities, along with their vendors and user groups, differ in how the various identities relate to one another, in their prominence and in the business models through which they pursue their OSS innovations. Table 1 summarises the OSS communities across their three parties of actors. This section discusses the identities across vendors, communities and users, and how they are interrelated.

In the cases, OSS community identities were: (1) expressed only subtly and inconsistently across interviewees; (2) closely linked to the vendor or the software; (3) reproduced from communications about the community (with such communication largely being coordinated by the vendor) or (4) connected to the OSS movement as a macro-level, non-market identity (cf. Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006; Jain et al., 2023).

Looking at the individual cases, in the MySQL case, community identity was strongly associated with the software. Developers expressed a coherent sense of shared purpose and team spirit:

This coherence followed from contributors meeting offline, working together directly rather than sequentially. Physical meetings and the co-location of developers meant that interactions extended beyond the database environment. This enabled the formation of interpersonal ties. At the same time, the connection to the vendor was strong. The vendor was heavily involved in, and directed much of, the development work. Thus, while the community identity was coherent, it substantially overlapped with the vendor's identity and with the way the vendor communicated its brand as the embodiment of the software.

In the CodeWeavers case, identity was largely tied to the reputation of the Wine project:

Wine's strong external reputation created an identity closely linked to the software and its brand as recognised by external constituents. The community also had greater ownership over the code base, which helps explain why contributors identified with the software rather than the vendor. In the CodeWeavers case, identity as internally shared values and identity as externally communicated reputation partly overlapped and reinforced one another. However, compared with MySQL, the sense of community was weaker. Contributors identified strongly with the software as individuals but did not view the community itself as a distinct entity with its own identity.

In the Cendio case, community identity was again not strongly articulated by contributors and was largely shaped by the identity communicated by the vendor. Nevertheless, the vendor's positive reputation strengthened developers' individual identities. Although contributors struggled to articulate a clear community identity, they emphasised that the vendor's reputation was decisive for their continued involvement and that working with OSS positioned them in an attractive market niche. This indicates a case of self-reflective identity linked to the vendor.

Finally, Red Hat had experienced periods of turbulence that complicated identification among its developers. When development was internalised by the vendor, contributors found it harder to feel part of the broader community. The coexistence of paid and volunteer developers further weakened the sense of a shared community identity. Conversely, the establishment of a patent pool created a sense among volunteer developers of belonging to a wider OSS movement.

Across the cases, factors such as retained IPR, offline meetings and external reputation influenced the presence and distinctiveness of community identity – as perceived by developers and as reflected in their individual identities. The organisation of meetings and the sharing of IPR link community identity closely to OSS governance arrangements (e.g. O'Mahony and Ferraro, 2007). For developers, participation in the community contributed to self-perceptions as innovative, leading-edge contributors (cf. Roberts et al., 2006).

The vendor identity refers to: (1) how employees of the vendor perceive it; (2) how the vendor is communicated and understood by external audiences – including the community and users – and (3) how it shapes employees' self-conceptions. Across the cases, the vendors are responsible for communicating the identity to others. This relates to how they are the ones to generate the income from operations and hence describes the vendors' marketing efforts to users and, importantly, to attract developers, thereby creating grounds for the innovative work of the community.

In the cases, the vendor's identity was either described without separating it from the community's identity or through an emphasis on the vendor's close association with OSS. All vendors thereby relied on their OSS orientation when forming their corporate identities. However, they varied in the extent to which they emphasised this and whether they primarily communicated their own identity or foregrounded the OSS community.

Red Hat is the vendor that invests most heavily in communicating its identity, targeting both community developers and users. Its identity is grounded partly in a self-ascribed pillar of innovativeness and partly in partnerships with major actors in the IT sector:

While driven by commercial objectives and partly relying on paid developers, Red Hat thereby nevertheless articulated an identity aligned with the OSS non-market movement.

MySQL, by contrast, works most deliberately on establishing shared organisational values. Interviewees characterised the vendor as driven by a consensus-oriented management style and a strong local presence. This identity formation was closely linked with the database and the community and was facilitated by the co-location of organisational members. Although MySQL communicated itself externally as an OSS vendor, it did not pursue an explicit positioning strategy:

In the case of CodeWeavers, it is the Wine project that provides values and reputation to the vendor, rather than the reverse. CodeWeavers is therefore associated with the Wine project and OSS more broadly, while the vendor remains comparatively backgrounded. This reflects how CodeWeavers hands back code to the community, allowing the community – and its established reputation – to serve as the public face of the vendor.

Cendio, finally, occupies the opposite position to CodeWeavers. It retains most control and IPR, meaning that the corporate identity and, as noted above, the community identity are largely those of the vendor, although communicated primarily at the brand level (ThinLinc). Sponsorships, however, remain associated with the Cendio name:

While prior research (e.g. Soenen and Moingeon, 2002) highlights the interconnection between corporate and organisational identity, the cases presented here indicate that a strong organisational identity does not necessarily translate into a strong corporate identity. Nor does a strong corporate identity guarantee a well-defined organisational one. Instead, another form of interconnectivity becomes visible: that between the community and the vendor.

In some cases, one identity dominates, depending on how operations are configured, including the degree of vendor control and the distribution of IPR. In others, the two identities coexist when developers and IPR are more evenly distributed across organisational boundaries. This illustrates how the interconnections between vendors and communities not only reflect governance structures, but also shape identities across contributors and employees, influencing whether the vendor or the software is more prominent.

User identity refers to whether users of OSS solutions develop a distinct or overlapping sense of identity in their roles as users. Across the cases, users sometimes associated themselves with the fact that they employed OSS solutions; however, they did not develop a shared user identity even if the OSS vendor had created a dedicated user community (see the Cendio and MySQL cases).

In the MySQL case, users either associated themselves with the Oracle Technology Network Community or overlapped with contributors in the MySQL community. Even when user communities were formally established, users did not interact sufficiently with one another to form a strong collective identity and therefore tended to identify with OSS only at an individual level. Meanwhile, users largely retained the identities associated with the organisations they represented (the firms they worked for). In instances where individuals were both users and contributors, their identity was more strongly grounded in their contributions to the OSS community than in their user role.

The absence of a distinct user identity underscores the importance of interaction and interrelatedness among actors for a collective identity to emerge. It also highlights how pre-existing identities – such as those associated with users' employing organisations – may conflict with or crowd out the formation of a new, community-level identity.

Table 2 summarises the different dimensions of identity related to OSS.

OSS innovations involve multiple actors at intra- and inter-organisational levels. In this context, identity fulfils roles typically associated with managerial oversight within firms, yet these roles are complicated by the indirectness of identity formation: the actors attempting to shape shared values or communicate identity are not necessarily those developing or using the innovations. Figure 1 summarises the different identities and their respective functions in OSS.

This section discusses the conditions under which identity functions to attract and retain developers within communities, and how these conditions relate to innovativeness. It discusses the relationships among the various identities associated with vendors, communities and users, including communicated identities (Alsem and Kostelijk, 2008), shared values, and self-reflected identities (Ashforth and Mael, 1996). Building on these perspectives, the section develops the concepts of co-identity and spill-over identity and formulates propositions.

While communicated identities play a role in attracting developers, it is only once contributors commit to the community that they begin to generate value. Past OSS research has mainly linked attraction to motivational factors, emphasising non-financial, yet extrinsic motives (von Krogh et al., 2012; Spaeth et al., 2015). Studies have focused on employability benefits, implying that contribution is a temporary stepping-stone rather than a sustained engagement and a value in itself. Identity as self-reflexive – being part of a movement (cf. Jain et al., 2023) and a community – is closely connected to such motives, yet has not previously been examined from this perspective or emphasised as involving intrinsic motivations. As indicated by the cases, the identity perspective captures not only the macro-level, non-market movement, but also the positioning of the self and the collective community as a self-reflexive identity, extending beyond conscious intentions or articulated ambitions.

As vendors are typically communicating identity to external audiences – including prospective contributors and users, also creating a linking mechanism between these – the message risks being shaped by extrinsic motives. However, the cases indicate that such communication tends to rely on the vendor's association with the community or with the software developed, rather than being commercially framed. As shown in the findings section, some of the OSS vendors draw on communities as central components of their own identity, whereas others depend on communities primarily for solution development.

To attract developers, community identity needs to be foregrounded, unless developers are intrinsically motivated by the ideals of a non-market movement. The latter condition is not consistently observed, as evidenced by the need for some vendors to supplement voluntary contributors with paid developers, given that not all contributors identified with the principles of such a movement.

With regard to retaining contributors, the cases indicate how strong identification with the community itself emerges as the most powerful basis for ongoing commitment, but also in coordinating contributors. An identity grounded in “being part of” a community becomes important for continuity (Ashforth and Mael, 1996), also as a self-reflected identity.

Vendors and communities are the primary sites in which shared identities are formed, whereas users seldom develop such identities. This results from the fact that users generally do not interact with one another. The greater the interaction (see the MySQL case), the easier it becomes for individuals to adopt shared values and develop a collective identity. While this occurs within vendors and communities, proximity between them – for example, when users and contributors overlap, or when vendor employees also volunteer in the community – facilitates the transfer of values. This leads to a first set of propositions:

For vendors using the community for actual solution development, the community identity becomes critical. It assists in attracting new developers and supports interaction among contributors. Furthermore, it reduces risks of conflict through implicit norms, guides development pathways and increases the likelihood that developers remain within the community.

Drawing on this article's dual perspective incorporating both corporate and organisational identity – where the latter includes self-reflexivity and recognises identity as an outcome of interaction and inclusion among parties – we can understand that each unit may contain these dimensions.

However, the OSS setting and the cases studied indicate that these dimensions are not utilised consistently across all actors. As demonstrated across the cases, identity emerges as separated, overlapping or absent depending on the actor – the community, the vendor and the users – in question. Moreover, while the communicated (Alsem and Kostelijk, 2008), embedded in organisational or self-reflected identities (Ashforth and Mael, 1996), could be expected to be mutually dependent, the cases show that these are not consistently related.

We conceptualise the relation across actors' identities as spill-over identity and co-identity. The cases namely show that the communicated identity is sharply oriented at the community, but how this influence may be general, shaping how the company presents itself as an OSS vendor, or more directly, where the community identity informs and modifies the vendor identity itself.

Evidence of co-identity appears when vendor employees actively participate in the community, while co-identity between users and communities occurs only where the same individuals both use and contribute to the OSS. This leads to a second set of propositions:

While maintaining developers is essential for an OSS community, even more critical is sustaining their innovativeness. Prior research suggests that a certain degree of fluidity in participation may be valuable for generating new ideas (Thompson, 2003). However, this must coexist with an open and inclusive culture in which shared identity and values play a central role. Taken together, this implies that OSS communities must strike a balance between attracting new contributors and retaining existing ones. It also indicates that hiring developers – as was the Cendio case – creates continuity, but potentially at the expense of creative renewal. This concerns not only the inflow of new ideas and competencies, but also how formal employment may introduce structural rigidity.

Relating spill-over identity and co-identity to innovativeness reveals that spill-over identity is primarily associated with communication, whereas co-identity reflects the conditions under which OSS solutions are developed. Co-identity presupposes the effective management of tensions between developers' intrinsic motives and vendors' extrinsic, often monetary, motives. These tensions are shaped in part by how IPR is allocated to the community, and in part by the commitment of individual actors and the success of the solutions produced. While contributors may be intrinsically motivated, they risk becoming reluctant to contribute if they feel exploited by the vendor. Such risks are mitigated when the vendor transfers IPR and when a strong collective identity is fostered within the community.

Notably, identity in this context also follows from innovativeness. Although developers are principally motivated intrinsically, they nonetheless identify with the commercial success of the software – even when they do not derive monetary benefit from it. Based on the notion of fluidity and continuity, as two contradictory forces, a final set of propositions is suggested:

As the cases in this article demonstrate, identity is multifaceted: governance structures and contextual conditions influence the likelihood that a community identity will emerge, while looser systems shape patterns of participation and ultimately how innovation unfolds.

Extending the insights above beyond OSS communities to collective action, social sustainability initiatives and other system-level forms of organising, it can be inferred that such arrangements similarly require offline interaction to construct identities grounded in shared values. This would be the case even when participants position themselves as part of broader macro-level, non-market movements. Overall, the three sets of propositions developed here may hold relevance beyond OSS contexts; however, their applicability requires further investigation and empirical testing.

This article describes and discusses the role of identity in OSS innovations, addressing the question: In what ways do the identities of communities, vendors and users contribute to the innovative outcomes of OSS communities?

The cases in the article indicate how OSS underlines identities as outcomes of interactions, while identity, based on its indirect roles, forms the enabling interaction patterns. The organisational identity as the foundation for developers to remain with the community is less based on how they associate with the community, and more so on how the participation in the community impacts their self-reflection (cf. Brown, 2006). Aspects that are important for the self-reflective identity of contributors are how attractive solutions the community develops (a task-oriented identity variable) and what other parties participate in the community (an actor-focused identity variable).

This article contributes to research on OSS (e.g. Pal et al., 2024; Okong'o and Ndiege, 2025) by pointing to the interrelatedness among identities of OSS vendors, communities and users, and their impact on the communities' innovativeness. This relates to an emerging interest in identity in communities (Schaarschmidt et al., 2025), highlighting in this article aspects that denote how non-monetary, intrinsic factors affect innovations in communities. The communicated identity is important to attract new developers, while the shared values guide innovation processes, make contributors remain with the community and through contributors' self-reflection lead to their continuous contributions in the community.

The article indicates the spill-over identity and co-identity between OSS vendors, communities and users, and how the identity communicated by the vendor needs to reflect the values of the community to create correspondence between developments and user expectations. The article also points to how interactions among actors are required for them to develop a shared identity. It is not enough that they work on the same OSS solution.

Combined, the dual role of identity contributes to identity research by integrating concepts drawn from multiple disciplinary traditions. At the same time, our focus on identity in relation to OSS offers a novel perspective within OSS research, enabling us to account for dynamics that extend beyond existing explanations. It also advances understanding of multi-party systems by illustrating the complexity that arises when actors operate under different institutional logics.

For practice, the findings of this article provide several important insights. For the successful construction of co-identity for innovation, managers should:

1. Align values across stakeholders. This involves ensuring coherence between communicated and internally developed identities. By involving actors across vendors, communities and users in branding processes, managers can ensure that external communication reflects actual values rather than being based on campaigns detached from practice.

2. Foster close interaction. As illustrated in the offline case, direct interaction promotes shared identities and should involve users, vendors and communities to achieve coherence. Such initiatives also enable participants to reflect on their own identity, perceiving themselves as part of the broader OSS movement rather than solely as contributors to a specific solution or project.

3. Support contributor agency. Contributors should be recognised as primary informants for identity communication. This ensures that what is communicated externally – including to attract new developers – is grounded in the beliefs and practices of the community itself.

4. Monitor dependencies and tensions. Previous OSS research highlights tensions between the intrinsic motives of communities and the extrinsic motives of vendors. Beyond these, misalignments in identities and reputations can also create friction. By understanding how these tensions propagate across stakeholders, managers can allocate resources effectively and maintain innovativeness.

In terms of societal implications, vendors should support structures that enable voluntary engagement with communities while ensuring the quality of outputs and efficient resource use, thereby minimising negative environmental impacts. Communities linked to non-market movements may provide fertile ground for generating sustainable solutions and promoting inclusivity for both contributors and users.

This article is based on a limited number of cases drawn from mature, advanced economies. Additional cases are therefore required to test and extend the findings presented here. This includes studies that empirically examine the effects of identity, as well as research conducted in other geographical contexts and across different types of communities and system-level forms of organising. The propositions suggested in the article could be developed into hypotheses for quantitative testing.

Moreover, the notion of dual identity – and, by extension, the multidisciplinary character of the identity concept – offers a promising avenue for further investigation, both conceptually and empirically.

Overall, this article aims to stimulate interest in applying new theoretical lenses to OSS research and to suggest that emerging organisational forms and informal institutional logic may benefit from perspectives that extend beyond those typically adopted in current scholarship.

Parts of the article have been proofread using AI.

1. Interviewee background: education, past work experience, time spent developing/working in OSS: roles, communities, key contributions.

2. Operations of vendor, users and community: distribution of tasks, IPR, governance. Experiences and impressions related to these.

3. Impressions of other parties (if e.g. engaging in the community: about vendor and users). What affected such impressions; how they were linked.

4. Impression of self and related to the community, vendors and users. What affected this impression and the feeling of potentially being part of a collective identity.

5. Marketing efforts across parties. What, when and how. How these were experienced and affected engagement and self-identity.

6. Meaning of identity for contributing: examples, expressions, contradictions.

7. Innovation: Examples, types, contributions of interviewee. Ways of working with innovations, decisions related to them. Distribution of decisions across parties.

8. Changes over time of operations, experiences, impressions, distributions of tasks, innovation organising.