Companies’ Participation in OSS Development–An Empirical Study of OpenStack

Commercial participation continues to grow in open source software (OSS) projects and novel arrangements appear emerge company-dominated ecosystems. What is the nature of these arrangements? Does volunteers’ remain critical for ecosystems? Despite extensive research on commercial OSS, exact extent company contributions OSS development, impact this engagement may have volunteer community not been clarified. To bridge gap, we perform an exploratory study OpenStack: a large ecosystem with intense participation. We quantify companies’ via developers that they provide commits made by those developers. find companies far more than volunteers distribution different also highly unbalanced. observe eight unique contribution models based objectives characterize each model according three dimensions: intensity, extent, focus. Companies providing full cloud solutions tend make both intensive (more other companies) (involving wider variety projects) contributions. Usage-oriented but less driven particular business needs focus their specific addressing needs. Minor contributors include players (e.g., Linux Foundation) groups. A relating number diversity shows strong positive association between them.