Coopetition of Software Firms in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Abstract

Abstract. Software firms participate in an ecosystem as a part of their innovation strategy to extend value creation beyond the firm's boundary.Participation in an open and independent environment also implies the competition among firms with similar business models and targeted markets. Hence, firms need to consider potential opportunities and challenges upfront. This study explores how software firms interact with others in OSS ecosystems from a coopetition perspective. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three OSS projects. Finding shows that software firms emphasize the co-creation of common value and partly react to the potential competitiveness on OSS ecosystems. Six themes about coopetition were identified, including spanning gatekeepers, securing communication, open-core sourcing and filtering shared code. Our work contributes to software engineering research with a rich description of coopetition in OSS ecosystems. Moreover, we also come up with several implications for software firms in pursing a harmony participation in OSS ecosystems.

How do companies collaborate in open source ecosystems?

“…Knowing why and how individual companies participate in OSS, and what impact their participation might bring to an OSS ecosystem is not enough, however, because companies do not operate in isolation when contributing to OSS ecosystems [86]. Company collaboration within ecosystems has largely remained an unexplored topic [26]. Early work on collaboration explored whether companies would collaborate when jointly participating in an OSS ecosystem.…”

What to share, when, and where: balancing the objectives and complexities of open source software contributions

“…Supportive findings can to a large extent also be found in literature if compared to Section 2.1. For example, the idealistically motivated objective CO4 -Be a good open source citizen, implying that an organization should respect and understand the needs, governance and culture of the community [1,5,10,12,52]. Further, the commercially motivated costsaving objectives implied by the extended development workforce (CO12), and related benefits, has also been observed in a number of other studies (e.g., [23,27,42,48,66,68]).…”

A Community Strategy Framework -- How to obtain Influence on Requirements in Meritocratic Open Source Software Communities?

“…To build a symbiotic relationship, firms should first understand and learn to respect the needs, norms, and structure of the community [2,52,20,21,32,53], a form of "good citizenship" [51]. If there is a foundation encapsulating the OSS community, firms may have the option to gain influence through membership or sponsorship [48,51], or in other ways supporting the foundation, e.g., by supporting development with infrastructure [20], or general subject matter expertise [2].…”

“…A more direct and general approach to the control of code contributions is by having "a man on the inside", letting employees engage with the community [54,21,7,52,23,51]. An alternative is to contract members of the community directly to have them work on matters of importance to the firm [1,11,7,55,51].…”

“…In a meritocratic community, influence on the RE process is gained by proving merit, and as highlighted in the literature, this does not have to be limited to technical contributions [18,19]. In essence, it is about earning the trust and status among one's peers in a community [21,52,23]. Considering the differentiation by De Noni et al [43] between open-source based or collective communities, this characteristic can be assigned to both, even though the former is described as institutionalized and democratic, and the later as collective and meritocratic.…”