Why Do Developers Adopt Open Source Software? Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Free/Libre Open Source Software has evolved dramatically in the last twenty years and many open source products are now considered similar, or even better than proprietary counterparts. Given the evolution of softwareboth concerning its development and its usageit is likely that the motivations for adopting an open source rather than a proprietary product have changed over time. The goal of this work is to identify the current motivations for adopting open source software, and compare them with the motivations that held in the past. We conducted a set of interviews among software practitioners, asking them to rank motivations for the adoption of open source software, and we compared these new results with the motivations elicited in previous surveys published in 2010 and 2013. The results show that motivations have actually changed over time.

Considerations and challenges for the adoption of open source components in software-intensive businesses

“…business software projects incorporating Open Source Software (OSS) components (Synopsys, 2020;Tidelift, 2019;Szulik, 2018). Managers and practitioners in software-intensive businesses using CBSD frequently make decisions concerning the adoption of OSS components to be integrated into their tools and products (Franch et al, 2015;López L. Costal et al, 2016;Hauge et al, 2009Hauge et al, , 2010Stol and Ali Babar, 2010a;Ayala et al, 2011a;Lundell et al, 2017;Lenarduzzi et al, 2019;Spinellis, 2019;Kazimierczak et al, 2020). A key economic motivation for many businesses is the use of OSS as a means of short-cutting resource intensive software development processes (Spinellis, 2019;European Commission, 2017;Kazimierczak et al, 2020;Petersen et al, 2018;Badampudi et al, 2016).…”

“…In general, however, practitioners and companies developed their own approaches to support the evaluation and adoption of OSS components (Ayala et al, 2011a;Hauge et al, 2010). During the second decade, the motivations of software developers to adopt OSS components have evolved (Lenarduzzi et al, 2019). Developers moved from seeing OSS components as a cost free alternative, to something that requires investment of effort for businesses to adopt and use.…”

“…Developers moved from seeing OSS components as a cost free alternative, to something that requires investment of effort for businesses to adopt and use. Accordingly they prioritised the ease of software customisation and the availability of support from either community or commercial sources as key factors when evaluating software (Lenarduzzi et al, 2019).…”

“…Meanwhile the extent to which companies adopt and use OSS components has increased (Synopsys, 2020;Tidelift, 2019) with only limited accounts of the practices used within companies to support component adoption. More formalised schemes for evaluating OSS software described 10 years ago by Stol and Ali Babar (2010b), among others, no longer feature in the academic and practitioner literature and more recent research has shown that attitudes towards OSS components within businesses are changing (Lenarduzzi et al, 2019). In the absence of formalised methods, and given changes in the extent and scale of OSS component adoption, what work practices are businesses using to evaluate OSS components for adoption?…”

Comparing Static Analysis and Code Smells as Defect Predictors: An Empirical Study

“…In this paper, we address these questions by investigating the extent of the effectiveness of static analysis as bugs detector by itself and in combination with code smells in guiding inspections. These questions are important especially when developers reuse software written by other developers, as is usually the case with Open Source Software (OSS) [26,25].…”