Turnover of Companies in OpenStack: Prevalence and Rationale

To achieve commercial goals, companies have made substantial contributions to large open-source software (OSS) ecosystems such as OpenStack and become the main contributors. However, they often withdraw their employees for a variety of reasons, which may affect sustainability OSS projects. While turnover individual contributors has been extensively investigated, there is lack knowledge about nature companies’ withdrawal. this end, we conduct mixed-methods empirical study on reveal how common company withdrawals were, what degree withdrawn contributions, rationale behind was. By analyzing commit data 18 versions OpenStack, find that number left increasing even surpasses joined in later versions. Approximately 12% each version exited by next version. Compared sustaining same version, tend weaker contribution intensity but contribute similar scope repositories OpenStack. Through conducting developer survey, four aspects reasons withdrawal from OpenStack: company, community, developer, project. The most lie aspect, i.e., either achieved its goals or failed do so. fitting survival analysis model, are associated with probability company’s withdrawal, scale positively correlated retention. Maintaining good retention important challenging ecosystems, our results shed light potential approaches improve reduce negative impact