  In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards
geographically-distributed software development teams is being challenged by
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. While practitioners move with
difficulties towards globally distributed software development, there is a lack
of research addressing the collaboration dynamics of large-scale distributed
software projects. More particularly, even if there are empirical
manifestations of collaboration among software-houses that market
rival-software products within the same market, there is a clear lack of
research addressing the development of information systems by coopetitive
manners. While addressing a previous call for the advancement of methods and
techniques to support the visualization of temporal aspects to represent change
and evolution in ecosystems, we combined and virtual-ethnography (VA) with a
Social Network Analysis (SNA) over publicly-available and naturally-occurring
data that allowed us to re-construct and visualize the evolution of the WebKit
collaboration in a sequence of networks. We started by screening, publicly
available data such as company announcements, financial reports and
specialized-press that allowed us to gain insights of the industrial context.
After attaining a better understanding of the the competitive dynamics of the
mobile-devices and PC industries, we started extracting and analyzing the
social network of the WebKit community leveraging SNA, which is an emergent
method widely established across disciplines of social sciences in general.Our
case confirmed much of the established literature on coopetition, but more
detailed observations revealed that not all coopetition theoretical
propositions can be generalized to the open-source arena.
