How Developers Participate in Open Source Projects: a Replicate Case Study on JBossAS, JOnAS and Apache Geronimo

Ten years passed from the study of how open source projects develop compared with commercial projects by Mockus et al. More and more companies have been joining and supporting open source projects. Have they changed the essence of OSS development? Do the hypotheses in the former study still hold? In this paper we replicate Apache study to understand the current situation of open source development, in particular, the developers’ participation in the commercially supported OSS projects. We investigate three open source projects from J2EE platform domain: JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo, which all have a commercial background. By answering five of seven of the research questions in Apache study, we evaluate four of the seven hypotheses finding the following: the number of the core developers was around 15 in JOnAS and Geronimo. But the JBossAS had a much larger core team; all the three projects haven’t achieved a large number of outside contributors to free the core developers from finding and repairing defects; most of the non-core developers participated in the projects contributing with new functionality; all three projects reacted faster to customer problems than the commercial projects described in the former study but slower than in Apache. It appears that the commercial support can attract more volunteers to the projects, and drives the developers to be more sensitive to the priority specified by the issue reporters when they fix defects.