From proprietary to open source—Growing an open source ecosystem

Abstract

In today's business and software arena, Free/Libre/Open Source Software has emerged as a promising platform for software ecosystems. Following this trend, more and more companies are releasing their proprietary software as open source, forming a software ecosystem of related development projects complemented with a social ecosystem of community members. Since the trend is relatively recent, there are few guidelines on how to create and maintain a sustainable open source ecosystem for a proprietary software. This paper studies the problem of building open source communities for industrial software that was originally developed as closed source. Supporting processes, guidelines and best practices are discussed and illustrated through an industrial case study. The research is paving the road for new directions in growing a thriving open source ecosystem.