Coopetition of software firms in Open source software ecosystems

Software firms participate in an ecosystem as a part of their innovation strategy to extend value creation beyond the firms boundary. Participation in an open and independent environment also implies the competition among firms with similar business models and targeted markets. Hence, firms need to consider potential opportunities and challenges upfront. This study explores how software firms interact with others in OSS ecosystems from a coopetition perspective. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three OSS projects. Finding shows that software firms emphasize the co-creation of common value and partly react to the potential competitiveness on OSS ecosystems. Six themes about coopetition were identified, including spanning gatekeepers, securing communication, open-core sourcing and filtering shared code. Our work contributes to software engineering research with a rich description of coopetition in OSS ecosystems. Moreover, we also come up with several implications for software firms in pursing a harmony participation in OSS ecosystems.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-69191-6_10, Coopetition of software firms in Open source software ecosystems, 8th ICSOB 2017, Essen, Germany (2017

Myths and Realities about Online Forums in Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Study

The use of free and open source software (OSS) is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations, in particular regarding the provision and availability of support. Some of the biggest concerns about free and open source software are post release software defects and their rectification, management of dynamic requirements and support to the users. A common belief is that there is no appropriate support available for this class of software. A contradictory argument is that due to the active involvement of Internet users in online forums, there is in fact a large resource available that communicates and manages the provision of support. The research model of this empirical investigation examines the evidence available to assess whether this commonly held belief is based on facts given the current developments in OSS or simply a myth, which has developed around OSS development. We analyzed a dataset consisting of 1880 open source software projects covering a broad range of categories in this investigation. The results show that online forums play a significant role in managing software defects, implementation of new requirements and providing support to the users in open source software and have become a major source of assistance in maintenance of the open source projects

Decoding the "Free/Open Source(F/OSS) Software Puzzle" a survey of theoretical and empirical contributions

F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased exponentially. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sufficiently comprehensive account of these contributions in order to draw some general conclusions on the state of our understanding of the phenomenon and identify directions for future research. The exercise suggests that what is puzzling about F/OSS is not so much the fact that people freely contribute to a good they make available to all, but rather the complexity of its institutional structure and its ability to organizationally evolve over time.F/OSS software, Innovation, Incentives, Governance, Intellectual Property Rights

How Much is the Whole Really More than the Sum of its Parts? 1 + 1 = 2.5: Superlinear Productivity in Collective Group Actions

In a variety of open source software projects, we document a superlinear growth of production ($R \sim c^\beta$) as a function of the number of active developers $c$, with $\beta \simeq 4/3$ with large dispersions. For a typical project in this class, doubling of the group size multiplies typically the output by a factor $2^\beta=2.5$, explaining the title. This superlinear law is found to hold for group sizes ranging from 5 to a few hundred developers. We propose two classes of mechanisms, {\it interaction-based} and {\it large deviation}, along with a cascade model of productive activity, which unifies them. In this common framework, superlinear productivity requires that the involved social groups function at or close to criticality, in the sense of a subtle balance between order and disorder. We report the first empirical test of the renormalization of the exponent of the distribution of the sizes of first generation events into the renormalized exponent of the distribution of clusters resulting from the cascade of triggering over all generation in a critical branching process in the non-meanfield regime. Finally, we document a size effect in the strength and variability of the superlinear effect, with smaller groups exhibiting widely distributed superlinear exponents, some of them characterizing highly productive teams. In contrast, large groups tend to have a smaller superlinearity and less variability.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure

Transition of Governance in a Mature Open Software Source Community: Evidence from the Debian Case

As flourishing, productive open source software (OSS) communities mature, they have to introduce a variety of governance mechanisms to manage the participation of their members and to coordinate the launch of new releases. In contrast to other modes of governance of OSS communities, the Debian community introduced new mechanisms of informal administrative control based on a constitution, elected leaders and new functions attributed to interactive communication channels (like mailing lists or IRC channels) that can provide for community effects (and feedback). We show that these control mechanisms were introduced as a response to emerging innovative opportunities due the usage of source packages and heterogeneous learning processes by different groups within the Debian community.Open Source Software community, Governance Mechanism, Debian Community

git2net - Mining Time-Stamped Co-Editing Networks from Large git Repositories

Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g. collaboration, coordination, or communication from the commit history of projects. Most of the studied networks are based on the co-authorship of software artefacts defined at the level of files, modules, or packages. While this approach has led to insights into the social aspects of software development, it neglects detailed information on code changes and code ownership, e.g. which exact lines of code have been authored by which developers, that is contained in the commit log of software projects. Addressing this issue, we introduce git2net, a scalable python software that facilitates the extraction of fine-grained co-editing networks in large git repositories. It uses text mining techniques to analyse the detailed history of textual modifications within files. This information allows us to construct directed, weighted, and time-stamped networks, where a link signifies that one developer has edited a block of source code originally written by another developer. Our tool is applied in case studies of an Open Source and a commercial software project. We argue that it opens up a massive new source of high-resolution data on human collaboration patterns.Comment: MSR 2019, 12 pages, 10 figure

Analysis and Detection of Information Types of Open Source Software Issue Discussions

Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS) projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving relevant information from the discussion threads is a challenging task, especially when the discussions are lengthy and the number of issues in ITSs are vast. In this paper, we address this challenge by identifying the information types presented in OSS issue discussions. Through qualitative content analysis of 15 complex issue threads across three projects hosted on GitHub, we uncovered 16 information types and created a labeled corpus containing 4656 sentences. Our investigation of supervised, automated classification techniques indicated that, when prior knowledge about the issue is available, Random Forest can effectively detect most sentence types using conversational features such as the sentence length and its position. When classifying sentences from new issues, Logistic Regression can yield satisfactory performance using textual features for certain information types, while falling short on others. Our work represents a nontrivial first step towards tools and techniques for identifying and obtaining the rich information recorded in the ITSs to support various software engineering activities and to satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders.Comment: 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2019