# Systematic Literature Review of Commercial Participation in Open Source
Software

Xuetao Li<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Beijing Institute of TechnologyBeijingChina ,
Yuxia Zhang<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Beijing Institute of TechnologyBeijingChina ,
Cailean Osborne<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Oxford Internet Institute,
University of OxfordOxfordUnited Kingdom ,  Minghui Zhou<EMAIL_ADDRESS>School of Computer Science, Peking UniversityBeijingChina ,  Zhi Jin
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>School of Computer Science, Peking UniversityBeijingChina
and  Hui Liu<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Beijing Institute of TechnologyBeijingChina

###### 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 take extensive
participation in open source development and have had a broad impact. This
paper provides a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) of existing
research on company participation in OSS. We collected 92 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 the explored motivations of companies are mainly from economic,
technological, and social aspects. Existing studies categorize companies’
contribution models in OSS projects mainly through their objectives and how
they shape OSS communities. Researchers also explored how commercial
participation affects OSS development. We conclude with research challenges
and promising research directions on commercial participation in OSS. This
study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of commercial participation
in OSS development.

Open Source Ecosystem, Software Development, Commercial Participation, Survey

##  1\. Introduction

In the past two decades, OSS has been widely used in software production, and
a large scale of companies are rooted in OSS projects (Goggins et al., 2021).
It is reported that more than 90% of software products contain OSS components
(Harutyunyan, 2020; O’Neil et al., 2021). Enterprises have recognized the
potential of OSS, and their involvement has had a broad and deep impact on OSS
communities (Bonaccorsi et al., 2007; Robles et al., 2007). As reported,
companies contribute more than 90% of the code in each release of OpenStack,
an OSS cloud computing system (Zhang et al., 2019). Researchers refer to OSS
with extensive commercial participation111In this paper, commercial
participation in OSS is used to demonstrate the phenomenon where companies
have assigned employees or hired volunteers to make contributions to an OSS
project. This paper will use company, enterprise, and commercial organization
indiscriminately. as OSS 2.0 (Fitzgerald, 2006).

The cathedral and the bazaar (Raymond, 2001) are used as a metaphor to discuss
two fundamentally different development styles, i.e., the “cathedral” model of
most companies versus the “bazaar” model of open source. In the past 20 years,
rich merchants from the cathedral, i.e. companies, have joined the development
of OSS projects and have been playing an increasingly important role. This
influx of commercial participation, in stark contrast to the organic and
grassroots nature of the bazaar (Raymond, 2001), holds the power to shape the
very trajectory of OSS projects (Zhang et al., 2018). Companies may either
dominate the development of OSS projects to maximize their benefits (Zhang et
al., 2022c), or directly withdraw from the OSS projects once their business
strategies change (Zhang et al., 2022b). The essential differences between
companies and open source, e.g., profit-driven motives vs. open collaborative
spirit, bring both challenges and risks to the sustainability of OSS projects.

This phenomenon has attracted considerable research and discussion. For
instance, Zhang et al. provided a landscape of commercial participation in
OpenStack (Zhang et al., 2022a, 2018, c). Van der Linden et al. reviewed how
large European companies can navigate OSS projects (Van der Linden et al.,
2009). Riehle presented a series of studies discussing open source business
model (D., 2021; Riehle, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2019). Gonzalez-Barahona et al.
discussed how companies interact with free software communities (Gonzalez-
Barahona et al., 2013). However, current studies on OSS are scattered and have
different focuses, and companies and OSS communities still use their empirical
experience as a guide to interacting with each other rather than a systematic
architecture (West and O’Mahony, 2008).

A few studies have conducted literature surveys about commercial participation
in OSS, which either have a specific emphasis or have been published more than
a decade ago. For example, Wang et al. reviewed the motivations of both
individuals and companies for participating in open source projects (Fei-Rong
et al., 2005). Höst et al. (Höst and Oručević-Alagić, 2011) conducted a
systematic review of how OSS can be deployed in commercial software. A
comprehensive understanding of commercial participation in OSS projects is
still left as a knowledge gap. Thus, this survey aims to summarize the
existing literature to understand commercial participation in OSS
comprehensively. The results of this literature review can provide OSS
communities, companies, and researchers with a comprehensive perspective of
OSS development with the companies involved.

We started the systematic literature review of commercial participation in OSS
by choosing three digital libraries to gather related articles, i.e., ACM
Digital Library, IEEE Digital Library, and Scopus, and employed Google Scholar
to broaden our search using a snowball sampling method. Our search terms
revolved around OSS, Company, Participant, and their respective equivalents.
After conducting inclusion and exclusion filtering, we collected 92 papers
published in 51 venues. We analyzed the publication trend, publication venue
distribution, and method types of the 92 papers. We found that researchers
have explored commercial participation in OSS since 2002 with a small number
of papers, and then academic interest in this topic had a steady increment.
Twenty-nine percent of the included papers were published in the premier
software engineering conferences or journals. Additionally, most papers
conducted case studies by quantitatively or qualitatively analyzing the
repository data of OSS projects.

This survey mainly stands on the perspective of OSS development, to analyze
and discuss the 92 papers from three well-designed dimensions, i.e.,
companies’ motivations for joining OSS development, their participation models
in OSS projects, and their impact on OSS development. The reasons for the
three dimensions are as follows: companies’ motivations can profoundly shape
their subsequent contributions (Zhou et al., 2016b); participation models can
reflect how they interact with OSS communities; the impact companies may bring
to OSS development is of great importance because it can largely determine the
sustainability of both OSS projects and commercial participation. Through
content analysis of the 92 papers, we embarked on an exploration of the
multifaceted relationship between companies and OSS projects. Drawing
inspiration from existing literature (Fei-Rong et al., 2005), we categorized
companies’ motivations into three distinct types: Economic motives,
Technological motives, and Social motives. Each motive type also has
subcategories. We conducted a thorough analysis of companies’ participation
models, encompassing their business objectives and contribution performance.
Additionally, we also categorized the various collaboration patterns exhibited
by multiple companies within the same OSS community. Furthermore, we
endeavored to unravel the impact that companies have had on OSS development,
including the effects on companies, volunteers, and OSS projects.

The significance of our survey lies in the following contributions:

  * •

We conducted a detailed examination of 92 relevant studies, shedding light on
publication trends, the distribution of publication venues, and types of used
methods.

  * •

With a comprehensive analysis, we sought to gain an in-depth understanding of
companies’ diverse motivations, participation models, and impact on OSS
development.

  * •

By identifying distinct challenges and untapped research opportunities, we aim
to facilitate the sustainable development of OSS projects with the
participation of companies.

This review offers a valuable resource for practitioners from OSS communities
or companies, providing an evidence-based understanding of the benefits and
engagement policies associated with participation in OSS. For researchers,
this review serves as a roadmap, highlighting existing empirical assessments
of commercial involvement in OSS communities, while also identifying areas
that have yet to be explored or require further investigation.

The remaining sections of the paper are organized as follows: Background on
open source software and commercial participation is presented in Section 2.
In Section 3, we introduce the research questions and describe the paper
collection methodology, including the search strategy and inclusion/exclusion
criteria. Sections 4 \- 7 introduce the results. We analyze research
opportunities in Sections 8 and limitations in 9. Section 10 discusses the
related work, and the conclusions are presented in Section 11.

##  2\. Background

Open source software is available with its source code under a license that
allows users to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for
any purpose (Raymond, 2001; Dahlander and Magnusson, 2008a; Butler et al.,
2018b). OSS is famous for its transparency, collaboration, cost savings,
flexibility, and innovation (Laurent, 2004; Marsan et al., 2012).

Over time, two main ideologies have emerged in OSS communities: one proposed
by the Free Software movement and represented by the Free Software Foundation
(FSF), and the other proposed by the Open Source movement and represented by
the Open Source Initiative (OSI) (Daniel et al., 2018). The concepts of free
software and open source are two closely related but distinct approaches to
software development.

  * •

The FSF is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and defending the
principles of software freedom through the use of free software licenses and
advocacy (Stallman, 2003). Free software, as championed by the FSF, emphasizes
the freedom of users to use, study, modify, and distribute software. The FSF
promotes the use of licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL),
which ensures that users have these freedoms. The focus is on the ethical and
social implications of software, advocating for user rights and community
collaboration (Williams, 2010).

  * •

The OSI is an organization that promotes and advocates for the benefits of
open source software, encouraging transparency, collaboration, and the use of
open source licenses (O’Mahony, 2007). Open source software, represented by
the Open Source Initiative, emphasizes the practical benefits of making source
code openly available. Open source software encourages collaboration,
transparency, and community development. The Open Source Initiative promotes
licenses such as the MIT License and the Apache License, which allow for
greater flexibility and commercial use (Daniel et al., 2018).

While there are differences in philosophy and focus between the free software
and open source movements, they share common goals of promoting access to
software and encouraging collaboration. Both approaches have had a significant
impact on the software industry and have led to the development of many widely
used software projects and communities.

Commercial entities have increasingly become involved in OSS development as it
has grown in popularity and become mainstream in information technology. These
entities may contribute to OSS projects in a variety of ways, such as funding
development, contributing code, and providing resources. There are two main
forms of the relationship between companies and OSS communities:

  * •

Community Open Source refers to the OSS projects where their community has the
autonomy to develop the software. In this relationship, companies are more
like organizational contributors to the OSS community, rather than the
software being owned by a single company. In the case of the Apache web
server222https://apache.org/, individual developers, the committers in
particular, make decisions about the software development, not a specific
company.

  * •

Commercial Open Source refers to OSS projects that are owned by a company
(Riehle, 2012). The direct benefits to the community are captured by the
company, which owns the copyright and determines what is accepted into the
software code base and what is implemented next. For example, the company
Oracle is in charge of the development of MySQL
database333https://www.mysql.com/.

The difference between Community Open Source and Commercial Open Source is not
whether it is profitable. As Riehle says (Riehle, 2007): “community open
source can also be commercial. The key distinction is whether the power to
make decisions about the project is in the hands of the OSS community or a
single entity such as a company.

Increasingly companies have been involved in OSS projects since 2001 (Van der
Linden et al., 2009; Lerner and Tirole, 2001). With the deepening of business
involvement, many articles refer to it as the new stage of OSS. For instance,
Fitzgerald et al. refer to OSS with commercial participation as OSS 2.0
(Fitzgerald, 2006), and Watson et al. refer to it as the second generation of
OSS (Watson et al., 2008) or professional OSS in contrast to the three types
of first generation OSS: community OSS, sponsored OSS, and corporate
deployment. Letellier et al. treat OSS with commercial involvement as the
third OSS generation from the perspective of the organizational structure of
OSS communities (Letellier, 2008).

OSS has indeed become an essential part of the software development landscape,
and its popularity has been growing steadily. The involvement of commercial
entities in OSS development has brought both opportunities and challenges. On
the one hand, commercial entities can provide valuable resources and funding
to OSS projects, which can help accelerate their development and adoption. On
the other hand, the involvement of commercial entities can also lead to
conflicts of interest, as they may prioritize their own business objectives
over the needs of the community. In any case, it is important to strike a
balance between the interests of the community and the interests of commercial
entities. That is why commercial participation in OSS has attracted the
interest of both academics and industry. This study conducts a systematic
literature review on existing research about commercial participation in OSS
to summarize the current state of understanding of OSS 2.0, identifying gaps
and challenges that further research should address, and providing an
empirical foundation for companies’ decision-making when getting involved in
OSS.

##  3\. Study Design

This study conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) following the
guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). In this
section, we specify the research questions we explored, provide the protocol
used in our literature review, and detail the process of collecting articles
and data analysis.

###  3.1. Research Questions

Figure 1. Mindmap of this SLR

The main objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive understanding
and analysis of the entire process of companies’ involvement in OSS projects,
and to do so, we formulate the following three research questions, as shown in
Figure 1:

We start by understanding some general characteristics of prior studies that
have explored commercial participation in OSS, i.e., the research trend,
publication venue distribution, and their applied methods.

  * •

RQ1: What are the characteristics of studies about commercial participation in
OSS?

    * –

RQ1.1: What are the trends of studies on commercial participation in OSS over
time?

    * –

RQ1.2: What is the distribution of the publication venues?

    * –

RQ1.3: What is the distribution of the research methods?

Next, we follow the process of companies’ participation in OSS and start from
the motivations of their involvement in OSS projects.

  * •

RQ2: What are the motivations of for-profit companies for participating in OSS
projects?

After knowing why companies get involved in OSS communities, we proceed to
categorize the models of how companies engage in OSS development.

  * •

RQ3: What are the participation models of companies in OSS projects?

In this paper, we use participation models to present the patterns of how
companies interact with the OSS community. With the increasing involvement of
companies in OSS, many paradigms, formats, and habits of commercial
participation have gradually emerged, which we follow existing work (Zhang et
al., 2019) and define as participation models.

In the last, we focus on an important aspect, i.e., how companies influence
the development of OSS projects, which is critical for the sake of OSS
sustainability considering the different nature of the bazaar and cathedral
and the possible conflict when they run into each other.

  * •

RQ4 (Impacts): What are the impacts of commercial participation on the
development of OSS projects?

###  3.2. Study Selection

We gathered pertinent literature on commercial involvement in OSS to address
our research questions. In this section, we provide a detailed account of the
study selection process, including the source of information, the design of
study search strings, snowball sampling, and criteria for study selection.

####  3.2.1. Sources of Information

In this paper, we selected three widely used digital libraries for our initial
collection:

  * •

ACM Digital Library444https://dl.acm.org/. This library contains a wide range
of ACM electronic publications, including journals and magazines, ACM
conference proceedings, and more than 250,000 pages of full-text materials.

  * •

IEEE Digital Library555https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/. The IEEE database
provides full-text information on journals, proceedings, and current standards
collected since 1988.

  * •

Scopus666https://www.scopus.com/. This source is the world’s largest abstract
citation database, covering the world’s broadest coverage of peer-reviewed
research literature in science, technology, medicine, and the social sciences.

The three selected information sources support our use of boolean expressions
for retrieval. The search process involved two steps. First, we searched the
three digital libraries. Second, we applied snowball sampling (Wohlin, 2014)
on the citations and authors of the selected papers to complete the search
process. Since the reference lists of most of the articles do not give
specific links to the articles, we used Google Scholar to snowball sample
papers to satisfy the accuracy and efficiency.

####  3.2.2. Paper Selection

Table 1. Synonym list we used to search related papers.

Keyword | Location | Synonyms
---|---|---
Open Source Software | Title, Keywords |  | OSS, Open Source, Free Software, FLOSS, FOSS, Open Source Community,
---
Open Source Ecosystems, Open Source Software Ecosystems
Company | Title, Keywords |  | Commercial, Business, Firm, Corporation, Association, Syndicate,
---
Establishment, Organization
Participant | Abstract, Keywords |  | Make use of, Joining, Contributing, Interact, Inflow, reciprocity
---
Retention, Collaborate, Affiliate, Enroll, Participation, corporate

We used the list of synonyms in Table 1 to build our search expression. The
keyword selection is based on the PICO components: population, intervention,
control, and outcome (Biolchini et al., 2005). And the synonym selection is
based on the guideline of being big and comprehensive. To accurately screen
the target papers, we define the search scope of important nouns in the scope
of title, abstract, and keywords. In the end, combined with the synonym list
we reached the following boolean expression to search the selected database.

0: Title or Keywords: (“Open Source Software” or “OSS” or “Open Source” or
“Free Software” or “FLOSS” or “FOSS” or “Open Source Community” or “Open
Source Ecosystems” or “Open Source Software Ecosystems”)

0: Title or Keywords: (“Company” or “Commercial” or “Business” or “Firm” or
“Corporation” OR “Association” or “Establishment” or “Syndicate” or
“Organization”)

0: Abstract or Keywords: (“Participant” or “Make use of” or “Joining” or
“Contributing” or “Interact” or “Inflow” or “Retention” or “Collaborate” or
“Affiliate” or “Enroll” or “Participation”)

In this step, we selected 129 papers, where 65 papers are from Scopus, 50
papers are from ACM, and 14 papers are from IEEE digital libraries.

####  3.2.3. Snowball Sampling

After the initial analysis, we used one-step snowball sampling (Steinmacher et
al., 2015) to increase the number of papers selected. The snowball sampling
includes two steps:

  1. (1)

Author snowball sampling. We checked the authors’ profiles of the initial 129
papers in Google Scholar to see if any relevant papers were not included.

  2. (2)

Backward snowball sampling. We analyzed the cited literature of the selected
papers, and relevant literature is included.

As a result, we got 21 papers by author snowball sampling and 57 papers by
backward snowball sampling.

####  3.2.4. Selection Criteria

With the 207 retrieved papers, we designed the following inclusion and
exclusion criteria to filter out unqualified studies. Specifically, we
established three inclusion criteria. Papers that meet all of the conditions
are initially included:

  * •

Written in English;

  * •

Must be available as a full paper;

  * •

Commercial participation in OSS is (at least a part of) the research, or
aspects of commercial participation in OSS are investigated.

In terms of studies that were not relevant to the purpose of this review,
typical examples of these excluded studies are those that discuss only
enterprise behavior that is not related to OSS or only OSS activities
regardless of commercial participants. In particular, the following two types
of content appear frequently and have been excluded:

  * •

Studies of commercial inner source, which refers to how companies apply open
source practices in their inner production environments; we try to limit the
scope of this survey from the perspective of OSS communities and leave
reviewing inner-source studies as a future avenue.

  * •

Studies of the set of processes or tools used by companies to use OSS
components as part of their commercial products, while minimizing their risks
and maximizing their benefits from such use.

We screened all of the selected papers for abstracts and analyzed them for
full-text reading. After de-duplication, we performed title, abstract, and
keyword analysis, leaving 44 (from Scopus), 19 (from ACM), and 10 (from IEEE)
papers. Full paper reading is the last part of the paper selection. In total,
92 papers are included in our system literature review. Our paper selection
ends in March 2023.

##  4\. RQ1: What are the characteristics of studies about commercial
participation in OSS?

In this section, we detail the results arising from the literature review of
the three sub-questions of RQ1.

###  4.1. RQ1.1: What are the trends of studies on commercial participation in
OSS over time?

Fig. 2 shows the distribution of 92 studies’ publican years. We can see that
researchers started to explore commercial participation in OSS in 2002, and
only a few papers appeared in this early phase. Since 2005, commercial
participation in OSS has gained more attention from academia. Compared with
other software engineering topics, such as deep learning for software
engineering (Yang et al., 2022), studies on commercial participation in OSS
are relatively scattered. With the increasing importance of OSS and the
growing number of companies involved, we suggest devoting more research
attention to this area.

Figure 2. Publication Trend of Studies on Commercial Participation in OSS.

###  4.2. RQ1.2: What is the distribution of the publication venues?

We collected each research paper’s publication venue, including conference and
journal. The results are shown in Table 2. Twenty-nine percent of the selected
papers were published in the premier conferences or journals of software
engineering, such as ICSE, TSE, TOSEM, and FSE. From Table 2, we can see that
software engineering is the field in which most papers are published. Besides,
there are also 38 studies published in economics, social science, and
management venues. Venues outside the computer science category are marked
with an asterisk in the table, such as Research Policy and MIS Quarterly. The
venue diversity shows the interdisciplinary nature of exploring the phenomenon
of commercial participation in OSS.

Table 2. Distribution of Publication Venues

Publication Venues | Count | References
---|---|---
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) | 8 |  (Bonaccorsi et al., 2007) (Butler et al., 2018a) (Capiluppi et al., 2010) (Dijkers et al., 2018) (Guizani et al., 2023) (Gurbani et al., 2006) (Y. et al., 2018) (Zhang et al., 2020)
IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS) | 7 |  (Bauer et al., 2020) (Daffara, 2007) (Hauge et al., 2007) (Hauge and Ziemer, 2009) (Lindman et al., 2009) (Lundell et al., 2006) (Nguyen Duc et al., 2011) (Robles et al., 2007)
IEEE Computer | 5 |  (D., 2021) (Riehle, 2007) (Riehle, 2019) (Riehle, 2020) (Zhang et al., 2022a)
Research Policy | 5 |  (Colombo et al., 2014) (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005) (Osterloh and Rota, 2007) (Stam, 2009) (West, 2003)
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) | 4 |  (Butler et al., 2019) (Capra et al., 2008) (Samuel et al., 2021) (Zhang et al., 2019)
IEEE Software | 3 |  (Aberdour, 2007) (Gonzalez-Barahona et al., 2013) (Van der Linden et al., 2009)
Information Systems Research (ISR) | 3 |  (Feller et al., 2008) (Ho and Rai, 2017) (Stewart et al., 2006)
MIS Quarterly | 3 |  (Daniel et al., 2018) (Stewart and Gosain, 2006) (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008)
Academy of Management Proceedings (AOM) | 2 |  (ALEXY and HENKEL, 2007) (Wagstrom et al., 2010)
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) | 2 |  (Zhang et al., 2022b) (Zhou et al., 2016a)
Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) | 2 |  (Link and Qureshi, 2017) (Riehle, 2009)
Information and Software Technology (IST) | 2 |  (Höst and Oručević-Alagić, 2011) (Shahrivar et al., 2018)
International Journal of Information Management (IJIM) | 2 |  (Andersen-Gott et al., 2012) (Linåker et al., 2016)
International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym) | 2 |  (Link and Jeske, 2017) (Tansho and Noda, 2015)
Management Science | 2 |  (Economides and Katsamakas, 2006) (Von Krogh and Von Hippel, 2006)
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS) | 2 |  (Marsan et al., 2012) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014)
Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) | 1 | (J. and S., 2005)
Association for Information Systems (AIS) | 1 | (Schaarschmidt and Stol, 2018)
Baltic Journal of Management (BJM) | 1 | (Yu, 2020)
Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) | 1 | (Fendt et al., 2016)
European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP) | 1 | (Weiss, 2018)
First Monday | 1 | (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004)
IBM Systems Journal | 1 | (Capek et al., 2005)
iConference | 1 | (Johri et al., 2011)
IEEE Intelligent Systems | 1 | (S. et al., 2006)
Information and Organization | 1 | (Schaarschmidt et al., 2015)
Information Systems and e-Business Management (ISeB) | 1 | (Riehle, 2012)
Information Technology (IT) | 1 | (Gonzalez-Barahona and Robles, 2013)
International Conference On Information Systems (ICIS) | 1 | (Daniel et al., 2011)
International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (ICMLC) | 1 | (Fei-Rong et al., 2005)
International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB) | 1 | (Nguyen Duc et al., 2017)
International Journal of Industrial Organization (IJIO) | 1 | (Llanes and de Elejalde, 2013)
International Journal of Information Systems and Management (IJISAM) | 1 | (Germonprez et al., 2014)
International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management (IJITM) | 1 | (Schaarschmidt and Von Kortzfleisch, 2015)
International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) | 1 | (Coughlan et al., 2013)
Journal of Enterprise Information Management (JEIM) | 1 | (Mouakhar and Tellier, 2017)
Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) | 1 | (Capra et al., 2011)
Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society (JBCS) | 1 | (Dias et al., 2018)
Knowledge, Technology & Policy | 1 | (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2006)
Long Range Planning (LRP) | 1 | (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2008b)
New Media & Society | 1 | (O Neil et al., 2021)
R&D Management | 1 | (West and Gallagher, 2006a)
Software-intensive Business Workshop on Start-ups, Platforms and Ecosystems (SiBW) | 1 | (Spijkerman and Jansen, 2018)
South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT) | 1 | (Munga et al., 2009)
The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE)777Formerly named “The ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE)” | 1 | (Zhang et al., 2022c)
The Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) | 1 | (Guizani et al., 2021)
Web Science (WebSci) | 1 | (Homscheid and Schaarschmidt, 2016)
Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering (GE) | 1 | (Newton and Fiore, 2023)
Others | 4 |  (Baranes et al., 2020) (Birkinbine, 2020) (O’Neil et al., 2021) (Terje, 2013)

###  4.3. RQ1.3: What is the distribution of the research methods?

To answer this question, the first two authors of our study analyzed every
inclusion paper’s research methods based on the full paper reading. The
classification standard of the methods is to give priority to the research
methods clearly stated by the authors. For studies that have not clearly
stated their applied methods, we extracted and categorized their methods by
reading their method sections.

Fig. 3 shows the method distribution of the 92 selected studies. More than one
method may be used when conducting the same study, which is presented by the
intersections in Fig. 3. We can see that most of the papers reported case
studies and gave a quantitative or qualitative analysis of collected data.
Specifically, 58 out of the 92 studies (63.0%) used the case study method to
explore how companies participate in OSS. Twenty studies (21.7%) are
systematic literature reviews. Nineteen studies (20.7%) use the quantitative
method, and 21 papers (22.8%) use the qualitative method.

Figure 3. Distribution of Reported Methods in the Selected Studies.

##  5\. RQ2: What are the motivations of for-profit companies for
participating in OSS projects?

There is a paradox, i.e., why do companies want to share their resources even
though they are less likely to dominate the market and their competitors can
acquire the same resources? The content of this section can answer this
question, i.e., what motivates companies to participate in OSS development?
After analyzing the selected studies, we find that social, technological, and
economic are the main aspects that companies focus on. Economic motivations
are the principal reason for commercial participation (Fei-Rong et al., 2005),
and social and technological incentives can also lead to economic promotion.
Table 3 provides a comprehensive list of these identified motivations from the
three categories and their references. We analyze each category’s motivations
in the following subsections.

Table 3. List of Companies’ Motivations toward Participating in OSS
Development

Motivation Field | Reference
---|---
Economic | More Effective Marketing |  (Capra et al., 2011) (D., 2021) (Gruber and Henkel, 2006) (Hauge et al., 2007) (Riehle, 2009) (Riehle, 2012)
Distribution Model Change |  (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Gonzalez-Barahona and Robles, 2013) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (Riehle, 2007) (Riehle, 2012) (West and Gallagher, 2006b)
More Customers |  (Andersen-Gott et al., 2012) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Hauge et al., 2007) (Riehle, 2007) (Riehle, 2012)
Cost Reduction |  |  (Andersen-Gott et al., 2012) (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2006) (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Fendt et al., 2016) (Hauge et al., 2007) (Hippel and Krogh, 2003) (Lindman et al., 2009) (Llanes and de Elejalde, 2013) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (Riehle, 2007) (Riehle, 2009) (Riehle, 2012) (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008)
---
Market Access |  (Colombo et al., 2014) (D., 2021) (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Fendt et al., 2016) (Llanes and de Elejalde, 2013) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (Riehle, 2007)
Technological | Higher Quality and Higher Availability |  |  (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004) (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2006) (Capek et al., 2005) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Fendt et al., 2016) (Hauge et al., 2007) (Lindman et al., 2009) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (Riehle, 2012) (West and Gallagher, 2006b)
---
Better Access To Requirement |  (Andersen-Gott et al., 2012) (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Guizani et al., 2023) (Riehle, 2009) (Riehle, 2012)
Driving Innovation |  |  (Andersen-Gott et al., 2012) (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004) (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2006) (Colombo et al., 2014) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Guizani et al., 2023) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (Riehle, 2019) (West and Gallagher, 2006b) (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008) (West and Gallagher, 2006a)
---
Social | Building Credibility & Trust |  (Guizani et al., 2023) (Lindman et al., 2009) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (West and Gallagher, 2006b) (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008)
A Larger Labor Pool |  (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2006) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Guizani et al., 2023) (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014) (Mouakhar and Tellier, 2017) (Riehle, 2007) (Riehle, 2009) (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008)
Improving Reputation |  (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2006) (Colombo et al., 2014) (D., 2021) (Feller et al., 2008) (Guizani et al., 2023) (Mouakhar and Tellier, 2017) (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008)
Promoting Standardization |  (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005) (Fei-Rong et al., 2005) (Lindman et al., 2009) (West and Gallagher, 2006a) (West and Gallagher, 2006b)

###  5.1. Economic Motivations

After the full-reading analysis, we found twenty studies have proposed five
economic types of companies’ motivations towards participating in OSS
development.

  * E1

More Effective Marketing. Economic efficiency is the fundamental starting
point of all activities of enterprises (Shatalova et al., 2015). OSS community
marketing is usually more effective than the company’s own marketing because
releasing a product in an open-source way can make it available to a large
number of users. If the community is happy with the product, it is likely to
share its experience with others, thus providing free marketing and increased
publicity for the OSS provider (Hauge et al., 2007). Potential users sometimes
prefer to trust OSS community marketing because everyone in OSS communities
plays a witness and can learn about the maintenance situation of OSS projects
from the code change history (Riehle, 2009). This kind of marketing is a free
and effective way to win recognition from customers. OSS products are highly
competitive in the market. The software product itself is also an
advertisement. The free user base is significant because many industrial OSS
vendors sell services related to the free product, and more free users mean
more potential paid users. Customers can learn more about the company from the
software product if it is a commercial OSS project (Hauge et al., 2007). In
addition, Gruber and Henkel gave evidence that participating in OSS projects,
engaging in discussions, and supporting activities can serve as effective
marketing for software firms, as potential buyers often seek capable software
firms in relevant OSS projects (Gruber and Henkel, 2006).

  * E2

Distribution Model Changes. A distribution model outlines how goods make their
way from the manufacturer to a consumer outlet. In the traditional closed-
source distribution model, companies mainly focus on selling software products
(Fei-Rong et al., 2005). However, when companies provide their products based
on open source, they obtain indirect revenue by selling related products (West
and Gallagher, 2006b; Fei-Rong et al., 2005; Riehle, 2009), instead of
directly selling products. Researchers found that switching to open source can
lead to increased profit per sale and increased sales volume (Gonzalez-
Barahona and Robles, 2013). Besides, companies can get to market faster with a
superior product at a lower cost than traditional competitors (Riehle, 2007,
2009).

  * E3

Customer Acquisition. Customers prefer OSS because the prices are lower than
the closed-source software. For commercial companies, more users mean better
economics, and switching from closed-source products to OSS results in more
potential customers. Especially in commercial open source, a self-supporting
community can grow into a large user base that can later be converted into
paying customers (Riehle, 2007). In addition, the risk to customers may be
lower because code auditing for everyone and addressing security issues are
much more efficient than in close source (Riehle, 2012; Fei-Rong et al.,
2005).

  * E4

Cost Reduction. With almost zero cost of participation, it is tempting for
companies to take advantage of the OSS community (Hippel and Krogh, 2003;
Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008). One way to utilize this is through alternative
outsourcing, where an OSS community can provide companies with a continuously
maintained and developed product, reducing the corresponding costs (Fei-Rong
et al., 2005). Besides, from the perspective of software development (Dias et
al., 2018), external developers play an important role in OSS development and
can decrease a considerable cost for companies. Because the external
developers’ contributions range from documentation to complex tasks such as
reviewing code or developing core code.

Individual companies typically invest less in OSS compared to closed source.
However, when multiple companies invest in the same OSS community, the
community as a whole receives a greater amount of resources than what a single
company would invest in closed source software (Llanes and de Elejalde, 2013).
As companies collaborate more with the community, the cost may vary based on
each company’s share of contributions to the OSS project. However, this will
not reduce the company’s profits because it can charge higher prices due to
better service and faster version changes (Riehle, 2007, 2012; Gonzalez-
Barahona and Robles, 2013). In addition, the community can perform testing,
maintenance, and bug fixes, thus reducing development costs and improving the
software (Hauge et al., 2007).

  * E5

Market Access. Because of its cost-effectiveness, friendly licensing policy,
high quality, and broad user base, OSS has a higher probability of penetrating
new markets in their early stages (Fei-Rong et al., 2005). Typically,
commercial open source communities dominate the initial open source market
because they can provide a clear direction and mobilize more resources than
community open source projects. However, as the OSS project matures, this
advantage may diminish because competing community OSS projects can obtain the
same tech source and may have access to more volunteer resources. Both have
better market access, but only with strong intellectual property protection or
other competitive advantages can they triumph and sustain a new market
(Riehle, 2007). Meanwhile, OSS communities also provide developing companies
with an opportunity. Companies can get free resources and achieve business
innovation (Colombo et al., 2014). This is valuable because only open source
can solve vendor lock-in and achieve innovation (Riehle, 2007).

###  5.2. Technological Motivations

We categorized three technological motivations of commercial participation in
OSS from sixteen studies, as shown in Table 3.

  * T1

Higher Quality and Higher Availability are two main attractive characteristics
of OSS (M., 2007) when compared with traditional software. The two
characteristics have a strong relation with rapid requirement acquisition and
innovation, which explains why companies would like to share code and
knowledge with the OSS community (Fei-Rong et al., 2005). Although the cost of
each company has decreased, the total investment received for the whole OSS
community has increased because of the breadth of corporate and volunteer
participation (Fendt et al., 2016). This also promotes better software
quality. According to IBM’s open source experience, the open source
development style attracted highly skilled developers, and the overlap between
developers and users of a given OSS project allowed for excellent and open
communication, rapid development cycles, and intensive real-world testing,
resulting in software that was often very good and sometimes excellent by
IBM’s standards (Capek et al., 2005).

  * T2

Better Access To Requirement. Requirements gathering and analysis are
significant but with huge costs. OSS provides an open platform for both
customers and developers on which real users can observe and engage with the
community and discuss product features (Riehle, 2009). As a result, the
company’s products can easily achieve the customers’ needs and then benefit
from the customers’ needs (Riehle, 2012).

  * T3

Driving Innovation. Taking full advantage of OSS projects can help companies
innovate, especially small- and medium-sized companies (Fei-Rong et al., 2005;
Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004). The combination of innovation and open source is
common and efficient in the real practice of many smaller companies (West and
Gallagher, 2006a). OSS offers companies the characteristic of flexibility,
which enables free customization, experimentation, and modification for
specific needs (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014; Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008)
based on OSS. This kind of innovation can even lead to a change in product
direction. In the early days, OSS often appeared as a copycat of commercial
software (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008). When the spark of innovation is
ignited in OSS communities, several OSS projects have become standards in
their fields, such as the Linux kernel (Sen et al., 2012). Existing work
discovered that large IT companies with a wide range of products participated
in open source because they could not ignore any significant external sources
of innovation available to their competitors (West and Gallagher, 2006a).
Despite the different starting points of large and small companies - large
companies to gain access to the same resources as their competitors, and small
companies to realize their own technological innovations - all companies can
innovate in the course of OSS cooperation.

###  5.3. Social Motivations

The development of OSS is full of large social collaboration activities
because contributors are distributed around the world, and their cooperation
is transparent and traceable. Some companies do not derive direct economic
benefits from OSS community participation but are still willing to allocate
technology and human resources to OSS projects. Because OSS involvement
facilitates their collaborative networking and creates access to social
capital, thereby contributing to financial performance (Yu, 2020). Fourteen
studies have mentioned four types of social motivations for commercial
participation in OSS.

  * S1

Building Credibility & Trust. Due to the transparency of open source,
companies’ contributions are transparent, allowing the outside world to see
the quality and maintenance status of their contributions, which helps
establish trust between users and companies (Guizani et al., 2023). This kind
of transparency is also what companies that use open source as an alternative
to outsourcing would like to see (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008).

  * S2

A Larger Labor Pool. The entire OSS community is a large labor pool for
companies. Companies prefer to look for top developers in OSS projects because
they can observe and evaluate developers’ capability through their commit
history (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008). Companies can avoid the risks of
inappropriate hiring because people in OSS communities have proven themselves
(Riehle, 2009). Benjamin Birkinbine argues that the greatest value for
companies comes from the processes of OSS development, enabled by a globally
distributed and free labor force, rather than the products themselves
(Birkinbine, 2020). However, a larger pool means easier hiring and firing, so
the salary of employees may be lower. To some extent, the reduced costs are
passed on to the employees (Riehle, 2007; Fei-Rong et al., 2005).

  * S3

Improving Reputation. Companies’ reputation can influence the choice of
customers and the onboarding of new employees to some extent. Playing an
important role in the OSS community is a valid way to improve reputation
outside the network (Feller et al., 2008). As for small and medium companies,
the acceptance of code into the official version is a qualification of the
company’s code quality and technology, which improves the company’s reputation
(Colombo et al., 2014).

  * S4

Promoting Standardization. This is another answer to why companies contribute
to OSS projects. OSS products can attract more users as we discussed in Sec.
E3, which can help establish their technology as an industry standard. Huge
economies of scale will come from the industry standard. This is essential
because companies can build a perfect product system around standardization,
with great revenue potential and great promotion to the company’s reputation
(West and Gallagher, 2006a; Fei-Rong et al., 2005).

Summary: Overall, existing studies have repeatedly pointed out that the use of
OSS can bring several benefits to companies, including economic,
technological, and social reasons, which can coexist. Companies’ ultimate
goals are to reduce costs and make better products. Motivation also varies
with company size, as companies at different stages of development may be
inclined to different dimensions of motivation.

##  6\. RQ3: What are the participation models of companies in OSS projects?

Companies contribute to open source for a variety of reasons. As highlighted
in (Butler et al., 2019), the value companies obtain from OSS projects largely
dictates their level and form of engagement. While target goals may be
similar, contributing models often differ between companies. After a
comprehensive analysis of the selected papers, we found that 13 studies
explored companies’ contribution models mainly from two angles: the
contribution models of individual companies and multiple companies’
collaboration models. In this section, we provide a comprehensive summary of
all these categorized contribution and collaboration models of companies.

###  6.1. Contribution Models

Existing studies proposed contribution models to understand how companies
behave in the development of OSS projects, which mainly consist of two parts,
i.e., the company’s business objectives and its engagement activities. After
analysis, we found two main angles that are used to categorize companies’
contribution models: how companies benefit from OSS projects and how companies
shape OSS communities.

How companies benefit from OSS projects. Companies’ objectives towards OSS
projects can drive their involvement and guide their actions for achieving the
objectives. Most of the studies distinguished companies’ involvement in OSS
via how the companies make profits based on the OSS projects, and companies
with the same objectives show commonalities in their contribution
characteristics.

  * •

Distributor. Companies following this model sell subscriptions to software and
associated services based on OSS products or components. This model is
suitable for complex software with potentially incompatible components. As
pointed out by (Wagstrom et al., 2010; Linåker et al., 2016; Zhang et al.,
2019, 2020), companies may package and distribute the entire output of the OSS
community, such as Linux distributors, or utilize specific components or
applications from the OSS community. Businesses focusing on the entire OSS
project or specific components can largely determine where a company
contributes.

Studies (Wagstrom et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2019, 2020) found that companies
aligning with the project community as a whole tend to make substantial and
extensive contributions, attract more volunteer developers, and have a
favorable reputation. They are less likely to contribute to the heterogeneity
of the community compared to component-focused companies.

  * •

Offer commercial versions and sell licenses. While developing the project as
open source, companies in this model make profits by offering a commercially
licensed version. The commercial version is normally more systematically
integrated and easier for users to use. This model benefits from community
contributions and encourages users to transition to the commercially licensed
version. Both Riehle et al. (Riehle, 2019) and Daffara (Daffara, 2007)
identified this type.

Companies with this objective tend to reach a dilemma (Riehle, 2019), i.e. the
OSS product must not be complete enough to avoid competition with its
commercial version but must be valuable enough to attract users. Therefore,
companies mainly contribute to their commercial version.

  * •

Complementary Services. Companies in this model generate revenue by offering
services to assist users in implementing and maintaining open-source software
effectively. They do not sell software licenses but rather provide expertise
and support. This model is first proposed in (Riehle, 2019), and
“Selection/Consulting Companies” in (Daffara, 2007), “Service Provider” in
(Linåker et al., 2016) and “Specific Services Oriented” in Zhang et al. (Zhang
et al., 2019) are homogeneous.

In this type, the role companies play is often not provider, but analyst
instead (Daffara, 2007), and they focus mainly on a few projects closely
related to their own business (Zhang et al., 2019) and make non-intense
contributions.

  * •

Integration. Companies following this strategy contribute through plugins or
drivers, integrating their offerings with OSS projects. Zhang et al. (Zhang et
al., 2019, 2020) identified this type of commercial involvement in OpenStack,
an open source cloud computing system, where companies like Intel pertain to
the integration of OpenStack with its existing products or services. “Product
supporter” proposed by Linåker et al. (Linåker et al., 2016) also belongs to
this category.

  * •

Usage Oriented. Like volunteers who make contributions to OSS to ‘scratch
their own itch’, companies also participate in OSS communities because of
utilizing the OSS products for their production requirements (Zhang et al.,
2019, 2020). The main goal of this strategy is to reduce costs and increase
efficiency by using OSS projects that are freely available and can be
customized to meet specific business needs. Linåker et al. proposed “Platform
user” to refer to companies that use Apache Hadoop to store and process data
(Linåker et al., 2016). Similarly, Zhang et al. found that users of OpenStack
make extensive–but not large by volume–contributions, with the main focus on
deployment tools. “Operational open source” defined in (Morgan and Finnegan,
2014) also belong to this type.

Usage-oriented companies typically engage in a wide range of projects and
prioritize the use of specific deployment tools that align with their
objectives and requirements (Zhang et al., 2019). These companies focus on
delivering practical solutions and products that cater to the needs of their
target users.

How companies shape OSS communities. To secure lasting revenue streams,
companies seek to control the development of OSS projects in which they
participate. Existing studies also categorized companies’ contribution models
through the perspective of how they shape and control the OSS communities. The
control level is manifested through various policies and actions. Dahlander et
al. categorized how firms interact with the OSS community in three ways
(Dahlander and Magnusson, 2008a): accessing communities to broaden the
resource base; aligning firm strategies with the community; and assimilating
communities to integrate and share results. These three ways show three
degrees to which the company uses the community, from interaction at the
knowledge level to changing the direction of the company’s or even the
community’s development. There is no doubt that the right method will give the
company a competitive advantage, so how to acquire, coordinate, and use OSS is
important and deserves thorough exploration. Existing studies also revealed
the development pattern of commercial software: most innovative software is
initially sold as commercial software, with time the software becomes less and
less innovative, and the company uses the software as OSS to cut costs and
regain power (Van der Linden et al., 2009; Baranes et al., 2020). This
development pattern can be treated as a strategy for companies to balance
competitiveness, creativity, and cost in community practice.

Dahlander et al. (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005) and Lundell et al. (Lundell
et al., 2010) inspired by natural ecosystems and proposed a typology of three
different basic models to elaborate how companies interact with the OSS
communities they are involved: parasitic, mutualistic or symbiotic, and
commensal. The parasitic approach refers to companies that only focus on their
own benefits without considering harm to the OSS community. The symbiotic
approach entails businesses participating in co-development with the community
while respecting OSS norms and values. The commensalism approach enables
businesses to gain from communal resources without actively aiding their
development. Companies in either symbiotic or commensalism approach tend to
respect OSS norms and values and obey licenses, while the former can have a
high possibility of influencing the OSS community. These studies also
emphasize the continuous nature of these approaches and highlight the need for
companies to navigate the delicate balance between openness and control in
their interactions with OSS communities.

Yu summarizes the engagement of companies via three dimensions (Yu, 2020),
i.e., technology giving, technology taking, and social participation.
Similarly, Weiss classified according to the strategic importance of open
source to the company (Weiss, 2018), which includes four levels: use,
contribute, champion, and collaborate. The ‘use’ level involves integrating
open source components into products. Companies at this level primarily
consume and utilize OSS in their products or services. At the ‘contribute’
level, companies not only use open source components but also engage in the
development and improvement of these projects. Companies at the champion level
initiate their OSS projects. They take on the role of leading and promoting
these projects. The collaborative level involves companies collaborating on
the creation of shared assets through OSS projects. The goal is to reduce the
cost of product development by working together on common projects.

Zhou et al. (Zhou et al., 2016b) categorized three commercial OSS involvement
models via whether a company manages the intellectual property (IP) once it
gets involved in an OSS project: hosting, supporting, and collaborating.
Hosting means that a company has full control over the OSS project. Supporting
refers to the situation when a company supports a project, but the project is
controlled by another organization. Collaborating means when a company has
shared control over the project with other organizations, which is the same as
the ’collaborate’ level proposed in (Weiss, 2018).

Summary: Existing studies categorized companies’ participation in OSS
ecosystems via their diverse strategies or aims of controlling OSS projects.
Companies utilize various business models, prioritize community involvement in
different ways, and contribute to OSS projects to various extents. In summary,
their commercial goals influence their actions and policies within the
community, shaping the overall dynamics of the participation model.

###  6.2. Collaboration Models

Besides exploring individual companies’ strategy models, another line of
inquiry focuses on understanding how and why companies, including market
rivals, jointly develop OSS projects and build collaborations between
companies in an OSS community.

Linåker et al. explored how different kinds of company stakeholders
collaborate in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem (Linåker et al., 2016). They
observed collaborations among all stakeholder categories, except for companies
selling Hadoop-based infrastructure and companies that sell Hadoop-related
services. Companies selling packaged Apache Hadoop solutions were the most
active, engaging in collaborations with other solution providers and various
stakeholder categories. Their results suggest that various stakeholders,
including those with both competing and non-competing business models,
collaborate within the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, revealing the
interconnectedness and collaborative nature of those involved. Similarly,
Zhang et al. conducted an empirical study of OpenStack and found that there
are three recurring collaboration patterns (Zhang et al., 2020): intentional
collaboration, passive collaboration, and isolated participation. Intentional
collaboration refers to the phenomenon where companies actively seek out and
pursue collaborations. Passive collaboration means that although companies
make contributions to the same OSS projects, they are linked together because
of their own interests, and there is no obvious coordination between them.
Unlike the first two models of collaboration, isolated participation means
that companies are the only contributors to an OSS project and these companies
do not collaborate with other companies. They concluded that most companies
work with others, or even with their competitors.

Snarby (Terje, 2013) explored companies’ collaboration from the communication
perspective and found three main categories. The first pattern, named
“gatekeeper”, requires a designated representative to navigate the code and
information flow within the OSS project. The “secure channel” pattern involved
using private communication channels to discuss sensitive OSS project-related
issues with other company collaborators. Subsequently, the “open-core
collaboration” pattern was noted, with companies contributing all code they
created to the OSS project’s public sources. These patterns offer insight into
the diverse methods by which commercial firms engage and collaborate with
community-based OSS projects.

Nguyen et al. found six main themes related to co-opetition among firms, which
are: Organizational boundary spanning via gatekeepers, Securing communication
among actors on firm competitive advantages, Open-core sourcing policy,
Business driven filtering of code sharing, Value of social position in OSS
community, and Friendly competitiveness (Nguyen Duc et al., 2017). The first
three patterns are almost identical to Snarby’s work. The fourth pattern
indicates that not all of the companies’ code will be contributed back to the
community, companies can contribute two kinds of codes, which are OSS core
codes and codes that are considered as open and/or standardized, aiming to
work together within the community to further develop the code that they have
contributed. The fifth pattern shows that companies want to achieve a central
position in the community, get more help from other community members, and
make it easier to integrate their codes into the project. The last one shows
that although competitors in the market may contribute to the same OSS
communities, they treat each other as partners or colleagues in the process of
contributing. Overall, company interactions in the community involve both
competition and collaboration, intending to gain greater competitive strength
for the company.

Summary:  Companies’ collaborations are important to the success of OSS
projects. Existing studies explored various patterns employed by companies to
foster collaborations in different OSS project cases. Some studies emphasized
the importance of finding a balance between collaboration and competition. It
is worth noting that compared to other research areas, studies of company
collaboration within OSS projects remain relatively limited.

##  7\. RQ4: What are the impacts of commercial participation on OSS
development?

The pervasive participation of companies in OSS projects can have a huge
impact on many OSS stakeholders, including companies, volunteers, and OSS
projects. In this section, we will discuss these impacts explored by existing
studies. Table 4 provides a list of impacts explored by existing studies.

Table 4. List of Commercial Participation’s Impact on OSS Development

Impact | References
---|---
Impact On Companies | Promoting the development of companies |  (Butler et al., 2019) (Ehls, 2017) (Linåker et al., 2016) (Lindman et al., 2009) (Link and Qureshi, 2017) (Nguyen Duc et al., 2017) (Weiss, 2018) (West and Gallagher, 2006a) (West and O’Mahony, 2008) (Yu, 2020) (Zhang et al., 2017)
Shaping the open culture in companies |  (ALEXY and HENKEL, 2007) (Daniel et al., 2011) (Gurbani et al., 2006) (Mouakhar and Tellier, 2017) (Riehle, 2007)
Attract more company engagement |  (Andersen-Gott et al., 2012) (Butler et al., 2019) (Feller et al., 2008) (Samuel et al., 2021) (Tansho and Noda, 2015) (Yu, 2020)
Impact On Volunteers | Loss of volunteer developers |  (Birkinbine, 2020) (Guizani et al., 2023) (Osterloh et al., 2002) (Stewart and Gosain, 2006) (Zhang et al., 2019) (Zhou et al., 2016b)
Role conflict for paid developers |  (Butler et al., 2019) (Daniel et al., 2018) (Homscheid and Schaarschmidt, 2016) (Schaarschmidt and Stol, 2018)
Impact On Projects | Increase project visibility |  (Bonaccorsi et al., 2007) (Capra et al., 2011) (Llanes and de Elejalde, 2013) (Newton and Fiore, 2023)
Reduce project openness |  (Bonaccorsi et al., 2007) (Capiluppi et al., 2010) (Capra et al., 2008) (Newton and Fiore, 2023) (O Neil et al., 2021) (Riehle, 2007) (Samuel et al., 2021) (Schaarschmidt and Von Kortzfleisch, 2015) (Schaarschmidt et al., 2015) (West and O’Mahony, 2008) (Zhang et al., 2022a) (Zhang et al., 2022c) (Zhou et al., 2016b)

###  7.1. Impact on Companies

This chapter describes the impact of commercial involvement in OSS projects,
either for the company itself or for other companies involved in the same
projects. After analyzing the 40 studies, we categorized three aspects of
impact on companies: promoting companies’ development, shaping companies’ open
source culture, and attracting more company engagement. Below we introduce how
and what impact existing studies have explored in each aspect.

  1. IC1

Shaping companies’ open source culture. Embracing open source can be
beneficial for companies seeking to innovate, attract talent, and navigate the
evolving digital landscape. However, transitioning from traditional,
hierarchical structures to community-driven open source can be challenging.
Open source’s decentralized and free-spirited nature often clashes with
traditional practices that prioritize profit and control. A key hurdle is
bridging the cultural gap between companies and OSS communities. Gurbani et
al. identified six areas of incompatibility (Gurbani et al., 2006), i.e.,
requirements, work assignments, tool compatibility, software architecture,
software process, and incentive structure.

However, bridging this gap can lead to substantial rewards. For example,
companies like OpenUpss demonstrate how openness can unlock a competitive edge
(Mouakhar and Tellier, 2017). OpenUpss has attracted a dedicated customer base
and fueled its technical expertise through its commitment to sharing code and
fostering innovation. Their partnerships with research institutions further
solidify their position in the OSS ecosystem. In addition, an open source
culture can lead to a more engaged and loyal workforce (Daniel et al., 2011;
Riehle, 2007). When employees are empowered to share ideas and contribute to
OSS projects, they tend to experience increased motivation and find their work
more meaningful. Alexy et al. examined the acceptance of OSS by staff
positions within the company (ALEXY and HENKEL, 2007) and found that software
testers and architects were particularly supportive of OSS involvement,
indicating the potential for widespread employee. To navigate this cultural
shift, companies can “dually adapt” to community and commercial habits
(Mouakhar and Tellier, 2017). This adaptation involves balancing community and
commercial logic through strategic maneuvers. It is crucial to establish trust
and foster collaboration by providing clear guidelines on intellectual
property sharing and contribution processes. Investing in essential resources
and partnerships can empower companies to contribute meaningfully while
protecting their core interests.

  2. IC2

Promoting companies’ business capability.

Intuitively, the greater a company’s level of engagement, the more strategic
its use of open source becomes. As a result, the company reaps higher value by
participating in OSS projects. However, this requires increased resource
investment, including human and financial costs (Weiss, 2018; West and
O’Mahony, 2008). Here comes a key issue that companies may face, i.e., higher
coordination costs and risks to integrate internal and external innovation
(West and Gallagher, 2006a; Butler et al., 2019; Lindman et al., 2009),
because it will inevitably bring changes in user experience, underlying code,
and security. In addition, companies need to strike a balance, because the
direction of OSS development is less likely to be in line with the company,
and not all the features of OSS are welcomed by the company’s customers.
Enterprises have two coordination directions: change the development direction
of the community or adjust their development direction. Link et al. studied
the relationship between the open source phenomenon and the development of new
enterprises (Link and Qureshi, 2017), and they found that the development of
OSS benefits the establishment and development of new enterprises. From the
reciprocity perspective, Yu (Yu, 2020) explored how a firm’s open source
strategy, characterized by its participation in the OSS community, contributes
to its financial performance. This study found that the OSS participation of
companies taking technology from OSS directly affects their financial
performance. On the contrary, the financial effects on companies that give
technology to or socially participate (mutually exclusive to technical
participation) in the OSS community, are fully mediated by the symbiotic
relationship between the company and the open source community.

However, some small companies are afraid to be the free labor to support the
dominant company of the community when contributing to the OSS community
(Zhang et al., 2017). Nguyen et al. (Nguyen Duc et al., 2017) examined how
firms maintain both collaboration and competition and discovered that
companies prioritize the co-creation of shared value and, to some extent,
adapt in response to the competitive nature of open-source software
ecosystems. Linåker et al. discovered that stakeholder influence and
collaboration have developed over time as firms become more interconnected and
interdependent (Linåker et al., 2016). Collaboration is essential for
addressing complex challenges, even among companies with competing business
models. Notably, firms recognize the value of collaboration and prioritize
common goals over competition.

  3. IC3

Attract more companies and coordinate their behaviors. Beyond purely
transactional benefits, Andersen-Gott et al. found a strong sense of moral
obligation to contribute among surveyed companies (Andersen-Gott et al.,
2012). Despite this, the “free-rider” phenomenon, where companies benefit from
the community without reciprocating, remains a concern (Yu, 2020). This way of
OSS participation, driven by short-term gain, ultimately hinders long-term
success. TanshoNoda et al. observed a significant gap between OSS utilization
and contribution rates among companies (Tansho and Noda, 2015). Feller et al.
explored how to restrain companies in OSS communities (Feller et al., 2008).
They found that companies’ behavior is restrained by their rights and
interests toward the OSS community. If a company consistently engages in
harmful practices in the community, it may be removed from the OSS network or
its access may be restricted, thus affecting the company’s reputation. In this
way, companies are restrained from behaving themselves in the collaboration
network.

As previously discussed in section 3, technology acquisition is a key driver
for company involvement. Interestingly, Butler et al. found that companies
whose products are part of an OSS project tend to be more engaged,
contributing to the community while simultaneously increasing their own
product value (Butler et al., 2019). This represents a perfect example of a
mutually beneficial partnership. Commercial participants in OSS communities
can attract deeper engagement from companies, leading to a thriving ecosystem
of collaboration and innovation.

###  7.2. Impact on Developers

Existing studies have explored the impact of commercial participation on both
volunteers and paid developers. After categorizing, the identified impacts can
be divided into two aspects: causing the loss of volunteers and suffering from
role conflict.

  1. ID1

Cause the loss of volunteers. The departure and retention of volunteers have a
strong relation with the sustainability of OSS communities. Volunteers tend to
contribute to OSS communities sponsored by non-profit organizations (Stewart
and Gosain, 2006). Because of the “xenophobic” characteristics of the
community where companies are highly involved, it brings challenges for
volunteers’ long-term contribution. Osterloh et al. suggested that volunteers
may cease contributing if the OSS community is dominated by commercial
entities (Osterloh et al., 2002). This is due to a lack of trust in the
adherence of most contributors to the mutual norms of reciprocity within OSS
communities. Although the increasing commercial participation in OSS is
related to a decrease in the inflow of volunteers (Birkinbine, 2020), not all
kinds of company participation harm volunteer participation. Zhou et al. found
that companies acting as collaborators in the OSS projects can increase
volunteer participation (Zhou et al., 2016b). Besides, the diversity of
companies in an OSS community matters a lot in developer inflows. Zhang et al.
measured the diversity of companies in OpenStack by the entropy of their
contribution models and found a positive relationship between volunteer
numbers and the diversity of companies (Zhang et al., 2019).

In some company-sponsored OSS communities, the companies will set up several
policies or measures to attract and retain contributors. Guizani et al.,
(Guizani et al., 2023) found that whether it is for internal employees or
outside developers, companies hosting the OSS project usually try to encourage
more contributors to participate. As for internal employees, the company may
encourage employees to make contributions to OSS projects to obtain benefits.
On the outside, the company will also use its influence to attract more
contributors. For example, companies may organize some incentive activities,
such as Google Summer of Code888https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ programs.
These behaviors have effectively introduced more contributors to a certain
extent and improved the sustainability of the OSS community. The acquisition
of the hosting company will also have a significant impact on the OSS
community (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008; Johri et al., 2011) because new and
old parent companies may have different values and attitudes towards the OSS
community. The most typical example is MySQL, which was taken over by Sun, and
Sun was taken over by Oracle later. The evidence shows that the community’s
contribution increased after Sun’s acquisition of MySQL, but decreased after
Oracle’s acquisition. This is partly because contributors believe that Sun is
an OSS contributor, while Oracle is not.

  2. ID2

Role conflict for paid developers. Paid developers play an important role in
the OSS community with increasing commercial participation. On the one hand,
paid developers need to fulfill the objectives of the companies that pay them
to contribute to the community. On the other hand, they can be easily
assimilated with the OSS community’s open, transparent, and collaborative
nature. In the survey conducted by Butler et al. (Butler et al., 2019), paid
developers are highly trusted by the organization, with one respondent even
stating that about 90 percent of his work on the OSS project was not
specifically requested or directed by the organization. Samuel et al. found
that (Samuel et al., 2021) paid developers have a clustering effect; the paid
developers of the same company prefer to support each other and prefer to
communicate internally. According to Homscheid et al., (Homscheid and
Schaarschmidt, 2016) the cultural conflict between company and community can
affect the paid developers’ sense of identity. Daniel et al. studied the
influence of employees’ perceptions of OSS ideology and other colleagues’
perceptions of OSS on employee contribution (Daniel et al., 2018), and they
find that employees’ commitment to their company reinforces the impact of
their commitment to the OSS community in driving ongoing code contributions.
Schaarschmidt et al. found that whether as part of the community or as part of
the hiring organization, developers’ imbalance in their understanding of
“self” can lead to role conflict, and this kind of imbalance can improve
turnover intentions (Schaarschmidt and Stol, 2018).

###  7.3. Impact on Projects

The impact of commercial participation on OSS projects has advantages and
disadvantages: companies can enable OSS projects to flourish to some extent,
but it can also pose risks to the long-term sustainability of the community
(Zhang et al., 2022a). In this section, we will discuss the investigated
impact of commercial participation on OSS projects.

  1. IP1

Affect project quality. Commercial participation can help OSS projects become
more popular and grow significantly with no need to solve the challenges of
human and infrastructure resources (Newton and Fiore, 2023; Capra et al.,
2011). Meanwhile, the projects that are participated by firms tend to be
larger and have more contributors than volunteers-powered ones (Bonaccorsi et
al., 2007). Llanes et al. (Llanes and de Elejalde, 2013) found that commercial
participation can provide OSS communities with higher-quality code and well-
considered functionality. However, Capra et al. indicated that higher firms’
participation can lead to lower structural software design quality (Capra et
al., 2011).

  2. IP2

Reduce project openness. Commercial companies can play a major role in the
decision-making and development of OSS projects (Capiluppi et al., 2010).
Closure represented by the company and openness represented by the community
will lead to conflicts in the process of combination (O Neil et al., 2021). It
can have an impact on intellectual property management (Bonaccorsi et al.,
2007), as evidenced by the fact that the GNU general public license is scarce
in commercially involved projects. Besides, to maintain benefits, companies
may try to influence the direction of the community. Schaarschmidt et al.
found that companies tend to rely on their resources or the resources of other
companies to control a project (Schaarschmidt and Von Kortzfleisch, 2015;
Schaarschmidt et al., 2015). As a consequence, the OSS community will reduce
openness (Zhou et al., 2016b; West and O’Mahony, 2008; Capra et al., 2008;
Zhang et al., 2022a), thus threatening the sustainability (Zhang et al.,
2022c). For OSS projects at an early stage, commercial engagement is welcomed
because of clear development direction and resources. In a mature community,
it may become a disadvantage because an open, free, and fair governance model
becomes more critical for the participation of volunteers and other
organizations (Newton and Fiore, 2023; Riehle, 2007; Zhang et al., 2019,
2022c).

Summary:  The relationship between commercial companies and OSS projects is a
mutually beneficial endeavor. Within this dynamic, companies derive advantages
from the openness of OSS projects, while OSS projects benefit from their
contributions of code and developers. However, several negative impacts still
exist for the companies themselves, for both paid and volunteer developers,
and for the OSS projects. How to foster a harmonious relationship between
companies and OSS communities will be a recurring topic in the future, and
there is no answer yet.

##  8\. Research Opportunities

There is already extensive literature on commercial involvement in open
source. Our study provides a snapshot of the research topics and the gained
progress. In this section, we discuss some future research avenues that
received scarce attention and are necessary for boosting the sustainability of
company-involved OSS projects.

Quantify the decline of user cost: Although many articles qualitatively show
that the cost for customers after commercial participation in open source is
reduced (Riehle, 2012; Fei-Rong et al., 2005), most of these studies are based
on interviews or experience. there is a lack of articles to quantitatively
explore how much cost advantage the company’s customers can gain from it.

Explore more OSS ecosystems: Much of the current research is focused on a few
specific, influential OSS communities, such as the Linux kernel, OpenStack,
and the Apache community. It is well known that software developed in open
source way covers a wide variety of categories, including operating systems,
databases, deep learning, and applications. More research needs to be done on
the countless OSS communities to compare the characteristics of companies’
motivations, contribution models, and the brought impacts in the context of
different OSS ecosystems with the consideration of project domains. By doing
so, companies can have a clear cookbook about how to behave for a certain OSS
project.

Stand on one company’s viewpoint to investigate all its involved OSS projects:
Existing literature mainly explores companies’ participation in the context of
a specific OSS project, few studies stand on one company’s viewpoint (Capek et
al., 2005). Hence, we can build an understanding of why and how companies
contribute to the specific project. However, one company can have interests in
multiple OSS projects and even open source own projects. With the natural
constraint of time and resources, companies need to manage and balance their
effort on all these involved OSS projects. Thus, focusing on single companies
and exploring their overall OSS participation strategies can shed some light
on how companies should embrace OSS.

A longitudinal study among diverse regions: Most studies focus on global
corporate participation as a whole. Researchers have explored how companies
from specific regions participate in OSS, e.g., Hauge et al. studied Norwegian
companies (Hauge and Ziemer, 2009), Tansho et al. studied Japanese companies
(Tansho and Noda, 2015), Lundell et al. studied OSS in Swedish (Lundell et
al., 2006), and Newton et al. studied country diversity in their study (Newton
and Fiore, 2023). From their results, we can see that there are differences in
the participation of companies in different countries to some extent. There is
no vertical research on the participation of companies in different countries
in OSS projects. Studying the differences across countries can shed light on
how cultural, economic, and even regulatory factors influence companies’
engagement in collaborative development. It can help identify the unique
challenges and opportunities faced by companies in different regions, enabling
a more nuanced understanding of their motivations, strategies, and outcomes.
By uncovering these variations, researchers can identify best practices and
lessons learned from specific countries that can be applied globally. This
knowledge can inform policy decisions, industry initiatives, and educational
programs aimed at fostering open source collaboration. Such knowledge can
guide project managers, developers, and community leaders in making informed
decisions and fostering inclusive and diverse collaborations.

##  9\. Limitations

This section discusses the potential threats to the validity of this study.

Construct Limitations: Our manual search strategy targeted three of the most
relevant paper retrieval agencies for articles. Two iterations of the snowball
sampling process expanded our search beyond these sites but were still limited
by the references included in the selected articles. And because of the
subjectivity of our researchers in manually reading and organizing articles,
the wording of some articles may differ slightly from the original text. We
developed detailed guidelines in the review protocol before the start of the
review to ensure that the selection process was as unbiased as possible. As we
screened papers, we documented the reasons for including or excluding them.

Internal Limitations: Since the research method, evaluation criteria, and
research object vary between different articles, even for the same research
area, and most of the studies in this review use non-standardized criteria to
express the size of the effect, our article is to aggregate and synthesize all
articles at the overall level. Some of the research analyzed in this paper
does not focus on commercial participation in OSS communities or only mentions
the relevant content. However, since commercial participation is a part of OSS
communities, the articles that do not only focus on commercial participation
can provide us with a more macro perspective on the phenomenon. Thus, we chose
to include these articles in this study.

##  10\. Related work

There are several existing survey papers on commercial participation in OSS.
In this section, we will analyze the current reviews and the differences with
our work.

Wang et al. conducted a survey about motivations for individuals and companies
to participate in open source projects (Fei-Rong et al., 2005). They combined
individuals and companies to describe motivations’ function mechanism and
divided motivations into three dimensions: i.e., economic, social, and
technological. Similarly, we also follow the three dimensions to answer RQ2,
the motivations of companies participating in OSS. The study (Fei-Rong et al.,
2005) strikes a balance between individuals and companies, which is different
from ours.

Höst et al. conducted a systematic review of OSS in commercial software
product development (Höst and Oručević-Alagić, 2011). This work mainly studies
how OSS can be deployed in commercial software. They only have a general
description of the motivations and methods for companies to participate in OSS
communities, which overlaps with our results of RQ2 and RQ3, but our research
is broader and deeper. Aberdour et al. reviewed the objective research on the
quality of OSS, and business participation is only part of it (Aberdour,
2007). Van et al. introduced the development of commercial participation in
open source in the form of introducing cases (Van der Linden et al., 2009).

Osterloh et al. introduced open source, reviewed its history, and introduced
the advantages of open source workflow (Osterloh and Rota, 2007). D., Riehle
presented a series of reviews discussing open source business model (D., 2021;
Riehle, 2012, 2019). Their works include many parts of OSS and commercial
participation, which is a great inspiration for our work. Shahrokh Shahrivar
et al. (Shahrivar et al., 2018) provide a systematic review of commercial open
source, which describes commercial open source business models and categorizes
them into value proposition, value creation, and delivery, which have some
overlaps with our RQ3’s results, but our survey also examines the motivation,
collaboration, and impact aspect of companies’ participation in OSS.

##  11\. Conclusions

In this paper, we presented a comprehensive literature review about commercial
participation in OSS. Specifically, we first collected and analyzed 92
research papers and we mainly divided our literature review into three themes:
Motivations, Models, and Impacts. Then, we provide summary statistics for all
selected papers based on full-text reading. We count the publication venue,
research methods, and publication year, and create visualization graphs. We
divided the motivation of commercial participation into three parts, economic,
technical, and social, and discussed them separately. We discussed the model
and paradigm for companies to participate in OSS projects and discussed the
factors that affect the model. Fifth, we analyzed the impact of business
participation and discussed the impact of business participation on ourselves,
volunteers, open source projects, etc.

For novice researchers and practitioners, our analysis of the commercial
engagement in OSS projects can significantly reduce ambiguity and barriers to
entry. In addition, the motivation, model, and implications of the summary
provide a theoretical reference for (1) insightful ideas for future
researchers to pursue promising research topics and solutions, and (2) future
practitioners (companies or communities) to engage in business activities.

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