The scientific journal "Information Economics and Policy", focused on economy as related to information and communication, launched, in December 2008, an issue dedicated to empirical issues in open source software. In this issue, several articles dissect the dynamics of open source and the internal organization of the community that creates it, in an attempt to assess the sustainability of the open development model. Papers touch on topics such as decision-making in the Debian project, geographical distribution of open source developers, the motivation behind contributors, among others.