The Reality of an Associate Model
Floor Aarnoutse, Cassandra Renes, Remco Snijders, Slinger Jansen · 2014
Two determinants of software ecosystem health are productivity of and value creation by the actors in the ecosystem. While keystone players use partnership models to orchestrate actors, the relationship between the type of partnership and activity has not been studied. To address this gap, we have researched the partnership model of the Eclipse Ecosystem and the activity of different types of partners. We have used Eclipse Dash and GitHub to gather data about the activity of Eclipse partners. The results show that a higher level of membership is related to more activity. However, it is also observed that non-member companies are more active than associate members, which suggests that Eclipse can and should improve their partnership model by motivating associate members and incorporating active non-member companies. In addition, other software ecosystems could use these results and implications to improve their own partnership models.