TY - JOUR
T1 - On the challenges of open-sourcing proprietary software projects
AU - Pinto, Gustavo
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Dias, Luiz Felipe
AU - Gerosa, Marco
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - The open source software (OSS) movement has become widely recognized as an effective way to deliver software. Even big software companies, well-known for being restrictive when it comes to publishing their source code artifacts, have recently adopted open source initiatives and released for general use the source code of some of their most notable products. We conducted an exploratory study on merits of the widespread belief that open-sourcing a proprietary software project will attract external developers, like casual contributors, and therefore improve software quality (e.g., “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”). By examining the pre- and post-migration software history of eight active, popular, non-trivial proprietary projects that became open source, we characterize the phenomenon and identify some challenges. Contrary to what many believe, we found that only a few projects experienced a growth in newcomers, contributions, and popularity; furthermore, this growth does not last long. The results from the study can be useful for helping software companies to better understand the hidden challenges of open-sourcing their software projects to attract external developers.
AB - The open source software (OSS) movement has become widely recognized as an effective way to deliver software. Even big software companies, well-known for being restrictive when it comes to publishing their source code artifacts, have recently adopted open source initiatives and released for general use the source code of some of their most notable products. We conducted an exploratory study on merits of the widespread belief that open-sourcing a proprietary software project will attract external developers, like casual contributors, and therefore improve software quality (e.g., “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”). By examining the pre- and post-migration software history of eight active, popular, non-trivial proprietary projects that became open source, we characterize the phenomenon and identify some challenges. Contrary to what many believe, we found that only a few projects experienced a growth in newcomers, contributions, and popularity; furthermore, this growth does not last long. The results from the study can be useful for helping software companies to better understand the hidden challenges of open-sourcing their software projects to attract external developers.
KW - Community engagement
KW - Open collaboration
KW - Open source software
KW - Popularity
KW - Proprietary software
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U2 - 10.1007/s10664-018-9609-6
DO - 10.1007/s10664-018-9609-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85043369621
SN - 1382-3256
VL - 23
SP - 3221
EP - 3247
JO - Empirical Software Engineering
JF - Empirical Software Engineering
IS - 6
ER -