Identifying Companies in Open Source Software Ecosystems
Jakob Buis, Slinger Jansen · Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) · 2015
Software companies with an interest in specific open source ecosystems can contribute by having employees contribute code to the software. It is of interest to the field of software ecosystems to determine the quantity of these contributions. This requires an effective and reliable way to determine as to at which company a contributor works. We propose a blend of various, fully-automated strategies and apply these in a case study of the software ecosystem around Eclipse. The results are validated using manual inspection and an e-mail survey. Using multiple strategies yields an identification of the place of employment in 41.4% of cases with 85.7%. Using these strategies, commercial contributors can be identified more accurately, enabling software ecosystem researchers to correctly identify commercial patronage.