How do companies collaborate in open source ecosystems? An empirical study of OpenStack

Zhang, Yuxia; Zhou, Minghui; Stol, Klaas-Jan; Wu, Jianyu; Jin, Zhi

How do companies collaborate in open source ecosystems? An empirical study of OpenStack

Files

ICSE2020.pdf(1.41 MB)

Accepted version

Date

2020

Authors

Zhang, Yuxia

Zhou, Minghui

Stol, Klaas-Jan

Wu, Jianyu

Jin, Zhi

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery, ACM
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Published Version

10.1145/3377811.3380376

Abstract

OpenSourceSoftware (OSS) has come to play a critical role in the software industry. Some large ecosystems enjoy the participation of large numbers of companies, each of which has its own focus and goals. Indeed, companies that otherwise compete, may become collaborators within the OSS ecosystem they participate in. Prior research has largely focused on commercial involvement in OSS projects, but there is a scarcity of research focusing on company collaborations within OSS ecosystems. Some of these ecosystems have become critical building blocks for organizations worldwide; hence, a clear understanding of how companies collaborate within large ecosystems is essential. This paper presents the results of an empirical study of the Open Stack ecosystem, in which hundreds of companies collaborate on thousands of project repositories to deliver cloud distributions. Based on a detailed analysis, we identify clusters of collaborations, and identify four strategies that companies adopt to engage with the Open Stack ecosystem. We also find that companies may engage in intentional or passive collaborations, or may work in an isolated fashion. Further, we find that a company’s position in the collaboration network is positively associated with its productivity in Open Stack. Our study sheds light on how large OSS ecosystems work, and in particular on the patterns of collaboration within one such large ecosystem.

Keywords

Open source software , OpenStack , Company participation , OSS ecosystem , Open collaboration , Software development

Citation

Zhang, Y., Zhou, M., Stol, K.-J., Wu, J. and Jin, Z. (2020) 'How do Companies Collaborate in Open Source Ecosystems? An Empirical Study of OpenStack', ICSE '20, 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, May 23-29, Seoul, South Korea. [Forthcoming]