Poster: Companies' Domination in FLOSS Development - An Empirical Study of OpenStack
Yuxia Zhang, Xin Lin Tan, Minghui Zhou, Zhi Gang Jin · International Conference on Software Engineering · 2018
Commercial participation continues to grow in free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects. Companies may take the lead in developing FLOSS rather than volunteers, which may change the nature of FLOSS development and affect the FLOSS community. Despite substantial research on commercial participation, it remains unclear whether companies dominate FLOSS development, to what extent the domination exists and whether the domination affects the FLOSS community. We therefore conduct an empirical study on OpenStack with a focus on its four main projects (Nova, Swift, Glance, and Neutron) to explore the commercial domination. We employ the development data of the four projects to quantify companies' contributions from two aspects: the developers they provided and the commits made by those developers. We find that there are nearly half of the versions, in which the four projects are dominated by one company. The dominant companies change occasionally, but the number never exceeds three for any project. We found that the commercial domination is negatively associated with the participation of companies and contributors, while it is positively associated with the productivity of contributors and the quality of issue reports. Our study contributes to the understanding of commercial domination and its impact on FLOSS community. Our findings reveal the adverse consequences brought by commercial domination in addition to its benefits.