  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.
