Exploring the Role of Commercial Stakeholders in Open Source Software Evolution

Abstract

Abstract. It has been lately established that a major success or failure factor of an OSS project is whether it involves a commercial company, or more extremely, when the project management is in the hands of a commercial software corporation. As documented recently, the success of the Eclipse IDE can be largely attributed to the project management of IBM, since the upper part of the developer hierarchy is dominated by its staff. This paper reports on the study of the evolution of three different Free, Libre, Open Source (FLOSS) projects -the Eclipse and jEdit IDE's, and the Moodle e-learning system -looking at whether they have benefited from the contribution of commercial companies. With the involvement of commercial companies, it is found that FLOSS projects achieve sustained productivity, increasing amounts of output produced and intake of new developers. It is also found that individual and commercial contributions show similar stages: developer intake, learning effect, sustained contributions and, finally, abandonment of the project. This preliminary evidence suggests that a major success factor for FLOSS is the involvement of a commercial company, or more radically, when project management is in hands of a commercial entity.

How do companies collaborate in open source ecosystems?

“…For example, Butler et al [9] investigated a variety of work practices used by companies to contribute to eight OSS communities, such as employing core project developers, making donations, and joining project steering committees. Further, the impact of commercial participation on OSS has been studied [11,88,92,93,98]. Zhou et al observed that a company's control mechanisms and a high degree of involvement are linked to a decrease in new developers joining the project but with improved retention of existing developers [98].…”

Similarities, challenges and opportunities of Wikipedia content and open source projects

“…One countermeasure to the observed declining patterns in OSS products is more and more often the inclusion of companies to sponsor the development , at various level of involvement, from simple partners, to contributors, and even as project coordinators . In other cases, and when corporate involvement seems less likely, a very large number of OSS projects lay amassed in open portals, without being developed further.…”

Key factors for adopting inner source

“…Of course, organizations may alter their software marketing strategy over time and make the software that was produced as an Inner Source project available as an open-source project, a phenomenon that has been termed Opensourcing [Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald 2008]. In such a scenario, an organization may still contribute to, or even lead the software project, in which case we speak of sponsored open source [Capiluppi et al 2012]. …”