Industry best practices for open source governance and component reuse

Harutyunyan, Nikolay; Riehle, Dirk

doi:10.1145/3361149.3361170

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…-Company 14 More best practices on getting started with open source governance can be found in the dissertation [19] or in our previous paper on the subject [20]. Furthermore, we addressed the research questions RQ2 and RQ3 on inbound and outbound governance in our previous papers [21] and [22], as well as in the dissertation [19].…”

Section: Getting Started With Floss Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Open Source Software Governance: Distilling and Applying Industry Best Practices

Harutyunyan

2022

Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2020

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Modern software architectures are becoming increasingly complex and interdependent. The days of exclusive in-house software development by companies are over. A key force contributing to this shift is the abundant use of open source frameworks, components, and libraries in software development. Over 90% of all software products include open source components. Being efficient, robust, and affordable, they often cover the non-differentiating product requirements companies have. However, the uncontrolled use of open source software in products comes with legal, engineering, and business risks stemming from incorrect software licensing, copyright issues, and supply chain vulnerabilities. While recognized by a handful of companies, this topic remains largely ignored by the industry and little studied by the academia. To address this relevant and novel topic, we undertook a 3-year research project into open source governance in companies, which resulted in a doctoral dissertation. The key results of our work include a theory of industry best practices, where we captured how more than 20 experts from 15 companies worldwide govern their corporate use of open source software. Acknowledging the broad industry relevance of our topic, we developed a handbook for open source governance that enabled practitioners from various domains to apply our findings in their companies. We conducted three evaluation case studies, where more than 40 employees at three Germany-based multinational companies applied our proposed best practices. This chapter presents the highlights of building and implementing the open source governance handbook.

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Section: Getting Started With Floss Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Open Source Software Governance: Distilling and Applying Industry Best Practices

Harutyunyan

2022

Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2020

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“…In our previous research, we proposed a set of industry best practices for corporate open source governance based on a qualitative survey of industry experts and primary materials [11,24]. We covered the following key aspects of FLOSS governance in companies: getting started with open source governance [18], inbound governance [19,21], supplier management [17], outbound governance, and general governance.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, we focus on corporate FLOSS governance, which consists of industry best practices and processes for dealing with open source use in companies [23]. To collect and publish such state-ofthe-art practices from the industry, we performed qualitative data analysis [24,11] of the 20 primary materials 2 and 21 expert interviews [17,18,19,21]. We derived our findings from the data gathered from a diverse set of companies with an advanced understanding of corporate open source governance, such as Google, Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, BMW, and others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Harutyunyan

Riehle

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Open source software usage in companies is on the rise, often resulting in lower development costs, higher quality, and quick availability of code. However, using open source software in products comes with legal, business, and technical risks. Experienced companies prevent and address these risks through corporate open source governance. In our previous work, we studied how top-tier companies got started with corporate open source governance. We proposed a set of industry best practices on the topic, using the practical format of interconnected contextproblem-solution patterns. In this study, we put the proposed state-of-the-art practices to the test by evaluating their real-life application in a case study at a Germany-based multibillion-dollar corporation with products in four distinct industries and more than 17000 employees worldwide. In the course of two and a half years, we conducted 35 semi-structured employee interviews and workshops in five divisions of the company to assess the initial situation of open source governance, the process of getting started with governance following our recommendations, and the outcomes. In this paper, we report the results of this longitudinal case study by presenting the artifacts created while getting started with open source governance, as well as the transferability evaluation of the proposed best practices, both individually and collectively.

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“…We used a pattern structure to present the identified practices, with patterns as an abstraction from a common solution to a recurring problem in a given context. This format can enable practitioners to benefit from our research, as argued in our previous work on benefits of using design patterns in an industry context [20] and in our previous studies employing this theory presentation format [7][8][9]. See Table 7 and Table 8 for examples of industry best practices for corporate open sourcing we derived from our data analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industry Best Practices for Corporate Open Sourcing

Harutyunyan¹,

Riehle²,

Sathya³

2020

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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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.

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Industry best practices for open source governance and component reuse

Cited by 7 publications

References 22 publications

Open Source Software Governance: Distilling and Applying Industry Best Practices

Open Source Software Governance: Distilling and Applying Industry Best Practices

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

Industry Best Practices for Corporate Open Sourcing

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