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Few studies of online communities take exogenous factors into account while explaining community participation. We present preliminary results from a study investigating the impact of steward companies' actions on online community participation. We identified two events: (1) open sourcing of Java by Sun and (2) acquisition of Sun (and consequently of Java) by Oracle, and examined participation in their developer online communities. We found significant change in participation levels around each event with both significant increases and decreases. We conjecture that participation increased if the action was perceived as supportive by developers (e.g. Sun's open sourcing of Java) whereas it decreased if the action was perceived as detrimental by developers (e.g. Oracle's acquisition of Sun).
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Johri et al. (2011) studied this question.
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