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On the challenges of open-sourcing proprietary software projects

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. https://developers.google.com/opensource/projects

  2. https://github.com/about/press

  3. https://github.com/atom/atom/

  4. https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/

  5. https://github.com/apple/swift/

  6. https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/

  7. https://github.com/apache/storm

  8. https://github.com/zulip/zulip

  9. https://github.com/github/hubot

  10. https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js

  11. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/1968

  12. https://opensource.guide/starting-a-project/#launching-your-own-opensource-project

  13. https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/pull/322

  14. https://enterprise.github.com/security

  15. https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/1929

  16. https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/2602

  17. https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/8452

  18. https://github.com/hubotio/hubot/pull/788

  19. https://github.com/hubotio/hubot/pull/489

  20. https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/14

  21. https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/23

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Pará, Belém, Pará, Brazil

    Gustavo Pinto

  2. Federal University of Technology — Paraná, Campo Mourão, Paraná, Brazil

    Igor Steinmacher & Luiz Felipe Dias

  3. Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Marco Gerosa

Authors
  1. Gustavo Pinto
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  2. Igor Steinmacher
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  3. Luiz Felipe Dias
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  4. Marco Gerosa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gustavo Pinto.

Additional information

Communicated by: Nachiappan Nagappan

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Pinto, G., Steinmacher, I., Dias, L.F. et al. On the challenges of open-sourcing proprietary software projects. Empir Software Eng 23, 3221–3247 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9609-6

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