Special issue editorial: Understanding software ecosystems

The term business ecosystem was originally established more than 20 years ago. In the seminal article ''Predators and prey: a new ecology of competition'' [1], Moore proposes an ecological approach to explain the co-evolution of companies within a business ecosystem by adopting a complex interplay of cooperative and competitive strategies. According to Moore, business ecosystems evolve in four stages: birth, expansion, leadership, self-renewal (or eventual death). The success of a company increasingly depends on the healthy co-evolution of other participants of the ecosystem. Thus, the concept of business ecosystem suggests that companies are engaged in interdependent relationships and strongly rely on each other for their mutual survival. Iansiti and Levien [2] also propose biological concepts to explain the health of business ecosystems by means of productivity, robustness and niche creation measures. The authors describe three types of actors within a business ecosystem: dominator, keystone and niche creation. The keystone organization plays a critical role in the ecosystem by creating and sharing value with other participants in the ecosystem. Software ecosystems can be considered a particular type of business ecosystems, where interactions among participants are performed around a shared technological platform. The software ecosystem research community has adopted several concepts and analogies from business and natural ecosystems fields. Different definitions of Software Ecosystem have been proposed. One of the oldest definitions is presented by Messerschmitt and Szyperski [3]: ''a software ecosystem refers to a collection of software products that have some given degree of symbiotic relationships.'' Jansen et al. [4] have defined a software ecosystem as: ''a set of actors functioning as a unit and interacting with a shared market for software and services, together with the relationships among them.'' Another definition by Bosch [5] is: ''the set of software solutions that enable, support and automate the activities and transactions by the actors in the associated social or business ecosystem and the organizations that provide these solutions.'' A common characteristic of all definitions is the relevance of relationships among participants in a software ecosystem. These relationships frequently have different nature and strength. The diversity of relationships supports the ecosystem health and enables the creation of innovative business models. Early work on software ecosystems was focused on the platform company and the models it could use to entice third party developers to contribute to its platform. However, software ecosystems are much broader. Modern software intensive systems companies depend on dozens and sometimes …