Systematic Literature Review of Commercial Participation in Open Source Software

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) has been playing a fundamental role in not only information technology but also our social lives. Attracted by various advantages of OSS, increasing commercial companies are participating extensively in open source development, and this has had a broad impact. Enormous research efforts have been devoted to understanding this phenomenon and trying to pursue a win-win result. To characterize the current research achievement and identify challenges, this paper provides a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) of existing research on company participation in OSS. We collected 105 papers and organized them based on their research topics, which cover three main directions, i.e., participation motivation, contribution model, and impact on OSS development. We found that companies have diverse motivations from economic, technological, and social aspects, and no one study covered all the motivation categories. Existing studies categorize five main companies’ contribution models in OSS projects through their objectives and how they shape OSS communities. Researchers also explored how commercial participation affects OSS development, including companies, developers, and OSS projects. This study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of commercial participation in OSS development. Based on our findings, we present a set of research challenges and promising directions for companies’ better participation in OSS.