Companies’ Participation in OSS Development–An Empirical Study of OpenStack
Companies’ Participation in OSS Development–An Empirical Study of OpenStack
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DOI：
10.1109/tse.2019.2946156
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发表时间：
2019-10
影响因子：
7.4
通讯作者：
Yuxia Zhang;Minghui Zhou;A. Mockus;Zhi Jin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Yuxia Zhang;Minghui Zhou;A. Mockus;Zhi Jin
商业参与在开源软件（OSS）项目中持续增长，在公司主导的项目和生态系统中出现了新的安排。这些新安排的本质是什么？志愿者的参与对这些生态系统仍然至关重要吗？尽管对商业参与OSS进行了广泛的研究，但公司对OSS开发的贡献的确切性质和程度，以及这种参与可能对志愿者社区产生的影响尚未得到澄清。为了弥合差距，我们对OpenStack进行了探索性研究：一个具有强烈商业参与的大型OSS生态系统。我们通过他们提供的开发人员和这些开发人员所做的提交来量化公司的贡献。我们发现，公司的贡献远远超过志愿者，而且不同公司的贡献分配也非常不平衡。我们根据企业的商业目标观察了八种独特的贡献模型，并根据贡献强度、程度和重点三个维度对每种模型进行了表征。提供完整云解决方案的公司往往做出密集（比其他公司更多）和广泛（涉及更广泛的项目）的贡献。以使用为导向的公司做出了广泛但不那么强烈的贡献。由特定业务需求驱动的公司将其贡献集中在满足这些需求的特定项目上。次要贡献者包括社区参与者（例如，Linux基金会）和研究小组。一个将志愿者数量与贡献多样性联系起来的模型显示，它们之间存在强烈的正相关关系。
Commercial participation continues to grow in open source software (OSS) projects and novel arrangements appear to emerge in company-dominated projects and ecosystems. What is the nature of these novel arrangements? Does volunteers’ participation remain critical for these ecosystems? Despite extensive research on commercial participation in OSS, the exact nature and extent of company contributions to OSS development, and the impact of this engagement may have on the volunteer community have not been clarified. To bridge the gap, we perform an exploratory study of OpenStack: a large OSS ecosystem with intense commercial participation. We quantify companies’ contributions via the developers that they provide and the commits made by those developers. We find that companies made far more contributions than volunteers and the distribution of the contributions made by different companies is also highly unbalanced. We observe eight unique contribution models based on companies’ commercial objectives and characterize each model according to three dimensions: contribution intensity, extent, and focus. Companies providing full cloud solutions tend to make both intensive (more than other companies) and extensive (involving a wider variety of projects) contributions. Usage-oriented companies make extensive but less intense contributions. Companies driven by particular business needs focus their contributions on the specific projects addressing these needs. Minor contributors include community players (e.g., the Linux Foundation) and research groups. A model relating the number of volunteers to the diversity of contribution shows a strong positive association between them.