Exploring the role of commercial stakeholders in open source software evolution

Abstract

It has been lately established that a major success or failure factor of an OSS project is whether it involves a commercial company, or more extremely, when the project management is in the hands of a commercial software corporation. As documented recently, the success of the Eclipse IDE can be largely attributed to the project management of IBM, since the upper part of the developer hierarchy is dominated by its staff. This paper reports on the study of the evolution of three different Free, Libre, Open Source (FLOSS) projects – the Eclipse and jEdit IDE’s, and the Moodle e-learning system – looking at whether they have benefited from the contribution of commercial companies. With the involvement of commercial companies, it is found that FLOSS projects achieve sustained productivity, increasing amounts of output produced and intake of new developers. It is also found that individual and commercial contributions show similar stages: developer intake, learning effect, sustained contributions and, finally, abandonment of the project. This preliminary evidence suggests that a major success factor for FLOSS is the involvement of a commercial company, or more radically, when project management is in hands of a commercial entity.