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Inflow and Retention in OSS Communities with Commercial Involvement: A Case Study of Three Hybrid Projects

Published: 27 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Motivation: Open-source projects are often supported by companies, but such involvement often affects the robust contributor inflow needed to sustain the project and sometimes prompts key contributors to leave. To capture user innovation and to maintain quality of software and productivity of teams, these projects need to attract and retain contributors. Aim: We want to understand and quantify how inflow and retention are shaped by policies and actions of companies in three application server projects. Method: We identified three hybrid projects implementing the same JavaEE specification and used published literature, online materials, and interviews to quantify actions and policies companies used to get involved. We collected project repository data, analyzed affiliation history of project participants, and used generalized linear models and survival analysis to measure contributor inflow and retention. Results: We identified coherent groups of policies and actions undertaken by sponsoring companies as three models of community involvement and quantified tradeoffs between the inflow and retention each model provides. We found that full control mechanisms and high intensity of commercial involvement were associated with a decrease of external inflow and with improved retention. However, a shared control mechanism was associated with increased external inflow contemporaneously with the increase of commercial involvement. Implications: Inspired by a natural experiment, our methods enabled us to quantify aspects of the balance between community and private interests in open- source software projects and provide clear implications for the structure of future open-source communities.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology  Volume 25, Issue 2
    May 2016
    328 pages
    ISSN:1049-331X
    EISSN:1557-7392
    DOI:10.1145/2913009
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 April 2016
    Accepted: 01 December 2015
    Revised: 01 November 2015
    Received: 01 June 2014
    Published in TOSEM Volume 25, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Hybrid project
    2. commercial involvement
    3. contributor inflow
    4. contributor retention
    5. extent and intensity of involvement
    6. natural experiment

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    • National Natural Science Foundation of China
    • National Basic Research Program of China

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