Industry Best Practices for Corporate Open Sourcing

Abstract

Companies usually don't share the source code for the software they develop. While this approach is justified in software that constitutes differentiating intellectual property, proprietary development can lead to redundant development and other opportunity costs. In response, companies are increasingly open sourcing some if not all of their non-differentiating software. Given the limited academic research on this emerging topic, we bridge the gap between industry and academia by taking a practice-based approach. We investigate why and how companies engage in corporate open sourcing. We take an exploratory case study approach. Our cases are four companies with multibillion-dollar revenues each: A major e-commerce company based in Germany; a leading social networking service company based in the USA; a cloud computing software company based in the USA; and a manufacturing and media software company based in the USA. We present the resulting theory in an actionable format of state-of-the-art best practice patterns.

Alignment-based conformance checking over probabilistic events

“…Patterns and pattern languages (sets of interconnected patterns) have been used for this purpose in the past, namely by Hannebauer and Gruhn [13], when presenting an overview of the current state of research via 40 open source patterns. In our previous work beyond open source governance, we also used the same format of theory presentation in publications on corporate open sourcing [18] and user and experience design in software product lines. governance and compliance awareness and maturity is one of the patterns implemented by our partners at the case study company.…”

Getting Started with Corporate Open Source Governance: A Case Study Evaluation of Industry Best Practices

“…Among others, Hannebauer and Gruhn [16] presented an overview of the current state of research on OSS patterns, including 40 published patterns, their key topics, and relationships between them. In our previous work beyond open source governance, we also used the same format of theory presentation in publications on corporate open sourcing [20] user and experience design in software product lines [22]. We formalized this method in a paper that can serve as a guide for other researchers interested in presenting their theories in a similarly applicable manner [36].…”

Towards open government through open source software for web analytics: The case of Matomo

“…Another study focuses on work practices used in public communication channels by company contributors to engage with and contribute to eight community OSS projects (Butler et al, 2021). Earlier research has also explored how and why companies engage in corporate open sourcing (Harutyunyan et al, 2020;Harutyunyan and Riehle, 2021).…”