Abstract
It has been lately established that a major success or failure factor of an OSS project is whether or not it involves a commercial company, or more extremely, when a project is managed by a commercial software corporation. As documented recently, the success of the Eclipse project can be largely attributed to IBM’s project management, 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 Open Source (OSS) projects — the Eclipse and jEdit IDEs 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 OSS 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 OSS is the involvement of a commercial company, or more radically, when project management is in hands of a commercial entity.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
- Open Source Software
- Commercial Company
- Content Management System
- Open Source System
- Open Source Software Project
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Aaltonen, T., Jokinen, J.: Influence in the linux kernel community. In: Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W., Sillitti, A. (eds.) Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation. IFIP, vol. 234, pp. 203–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Arisholm, E., Briand, L.C., Foyen, A.: Dynamic coupling measurement for object-oriented software. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 30(8), 491–506 (2004)
Basili, V.R., Caldiera, G., Rombach, D.H.: The goal question metric approach. In: Encyclopedia of Software Engineering, pp. 528–532. John Wiley & Sons (1994)
Berdou, E.: Insiders and outsiders: paid contributors and the dynamics of cooperation in community led f/os projects. In: Damiani, E., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W., Scotto, M., Succi, G. (eds.) Open Source Systems 2006. IFIP, vol. 203, pp. 201–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Bonaccorsi, A., Lorenzi, D., Merito, M., Rossi, C.: Business firms’ engagement in community projects. empirical evidence and further developments of the research. In: Proc. First International Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2007)
Bonaccorsi, A., Rossi, C.: Contributing to os projects. a comparison between individual and firms. In: Proc. 4th Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering (WOSSE), pp. 18–22 (2004)
Bonaccorsi, A., Rossi, C.: Intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms. do firms practise what they preach? In: Proc. First International Conference on Open Source Systems, pp. 241–245 (2005)
Capiluppi, A., Baravalle, A., Heap, N.W.: Engaging without Over-Powering: A Case Study of a FLOSS Project. In: Ågerfalk, P., Boldyreff, C., González-Barahona, J.M., Madey, G.R., Noll, J. (eds.) OSS 2010. IFIP AICT, vol. 319, pp. 29–41. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Capiluppi, A., Baravalle, A., Heap, N.W.: From “community” to “commercial” floss – the case of moodle. In: Proc. Third Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development, pp. 11–16. ACM (2010)
Capiluppi, A., Fernández-Ramil, J.: Studying the evolution of open source systems at different levels of granularity: Two case studies. In: Proc. 7th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE), pp. 113–118. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2004)
Capiluppi, A., Michlmayr, M.: From the cathedral to the bazaar: An empirical study of the lifecycle of volunteer community projects. In: Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W., Silitti, A. (eds.) Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation. IFIP, vol. 234, pp. 31–44. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Capra, E., Francalanci, C., Merlo, F.: An empirical study on the relationship between software design quality, development effort and governance in open source projects. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 34(6), 765–782 (2008)
Capra, E., Francalanci, C., Merlo, F., Rossi Lamastra, C.: A Survey on Firms’ Participation in Open Source Community Projects. In: Boldyreff, C., Crowston, K., Lundell, B., Wasserman, A.I. (eds.) OSS 2009. IFIP AICT, vol. 299, pp. 225–236. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Crowston, K., Wei, K., Howison, J., Wiggins, A.: Free/libre open-source software development: What we know and what we do not know. ACM Computing Surveys 44(2) (2012)
Dahlander, L., Magnusson, M.G.: Relationships between open source software companies and communities: Observations from nordic firms. Research Policy 34(4), 481–493 (2005)
Fenton, N.E., Pfleeger, S.L.: Software metrics: a practical and rigorous approach. Thomson (1996)
Guba, E.: Criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries. Educational Communication and Technology 29(2), 75–91 (1981)
Hofmeister, C., Nord, R., Soni, D.: Applied Software Architecture: A Practical Guide for Software Designers. Addison-Wesley Professional (2000)
Hou, D.: Studying the evolution of the Eclipse Java editor. In: ECLIPSE 2007: Proc. OOPSLA Workshop on Eclipse Technology Exchange, pp. 65–69. ACM, New York (2007)
Igarashi, A., Pierce, B.C.: On inner classes. Information and Computation 177(1), 56–89 (2002)
Li, W., Henry, S.: Object-oriented metrics that predict maintainability. The Journal of Systems and Software 23(2), 111–122 (1993)
Martinez-Romo, J., Robles, G., González-Barahona, J.M., Ortuño-Perez, M.: Using social network analysis techniques to study collaboration between a floss community and a company. In: Russo, B., Damiani, E., Scott Hissam, B.L., Succi, G. (eds.) Open Source Development, Communities and Quality, pp. 171–186. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
McCabe, T.J., Butler, C.W.: Design complexity measurement and testing. Communications of the ACM, 1415–1425 (December 1989)
Mens, T., Fernández-Ramil, J., Degrandsart, S.: The evolution of Eclipse. In: Proc. 24th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), pp. 386–395 (October 2008)
Merlo, E., Antoniol, G., Di Penta, M., Rollo, V.F.: Linear complexity object-oriented similarity for clone detection and software evolution analyses. In: Proc. 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), pp. 412–416. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2004)
Raymond, E.S.: The Cathedral and the Bazaar. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol (1999)
Robles, G., Dueñas, S., González-Barahona, J.M.: Corporate involvement of libre software: Study of presence in debian code over time. In: Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W., Sillitti, A. (eds.) Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation, pp. 121–132. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Robles, G., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Herraiz, I.: Evolution of the core team of developers in libre software projects. In: Proc. 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pp. 167–170 (2009)
Rossi, C., Bonaccorsi, A.: Why profit-oriented companies enter the os field?: intrinsic vs. extrinsic incentives. In: Proc. 5th Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering (WOSSE). ACM, New York (2005)
Santos Jr, C.D., Kuk, G., Kon, F., Suguiura, R.: The inextricable role of organizational sponsorship for open source sustainability. In: Proc. 2nd Workshop Towards Sustainable Open Source (2011)
Schaarschmidt, M., von Kortzflieisch, H.F.: Divide et impera! the role of firms in large open source software consortia. In: Proc. 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS (2009)
Shibuya, B., Tamai, T.: Understanding the process of participating in open source communities. In: Proc. 2nd Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development (2009)
Wermelinger, M., Yu, Y.: Analyzing the evolution of eclipse plugins. In: Proc. International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pp. 133–136. ACM, New York (2008)
Wermelinger, M., Yu, Y., Lozano, A.: Design principles in architectural evolution: a case study. In: Proc. 24th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), pp. 396–405 (2008)
Wermelinger, M., Yu, Y., Lozano, A., Capiluppi, A.: Assessing architectural evolution: a case study. International Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, 623–666 (2011)
Wermelinger, M., Yu, Y., Strohmaier, M.: Using formal concept analysis to construct and visualise hierarchies of socio-technical relations. In: Proc. 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Companion Volume, pp. 327–330. IEEE (2009)
Yin, R.K.: Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 3rd edn. SAGE Publications (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Capiluppi, A., Stol, KJ., Boldyreff, C. (2012). Exploring the Role of Commercial Stakeholders in Open Source Software Evolution. In: Hammouda, I., Lundell, B., Mikkonen, T., Scacchi, W. (eds) Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability. OSS 2012. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 378. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33442-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33442-9_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33441-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33442-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)