Success and geography: Evidence from open source software 
Authors: Gábor Békés, Julian Hinz, Miklós Koren and Aaron Lohmann

Abstract: Open source software (OSS) is a global, vast in scale, and extremely successful industry with millions of developers and millions of packages produced. How can groups of independent and geographically dispersed producers work together and create globally used products? This paper describes the relationship between product success (adoption of software) and the geographical dispersion of its producers. Focusing on the six largest programming languages, we find that while OSS developers will collaborate more intensively when in close proximity, more widely adopted software packages are written by a more spatially diverse group of developers. We explore explanations for this phenomenon related to selection of developer teams and search cost.