The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Thanks Dirk for the introduction.

Most importantly, thank him for the invitation.

I'm very glad to be here to give this talk.

I'm going to talk about inflow and retention in open-source software communities

with commercial involvement.

See, I think just as a group we talked about software is eating the world.

Right here I'm going to talk about open-source is eating the world.

Based on what's said in the open-source community, 80% of all software development is open-source.

And this curve shows the growth of open-source projects is exponential.

And they cover all sorts of important areas, including cloud, mobile, security, social media, and even 3D printing.

As a result, the companies actively participating in open-source software projects.

Almost every successful open-source software has companies involved.

For example, in the Linux kernel, Intel contributed 10.5% of changes.

Are you familiar with changes? Anyway, it's a term used in version control system.

Redhead contributed 8.4% from the 2015 Linux Foundation report.

That really projects benefit from commercial resources and prosper at the market, of course, sometimes.

A coin always has two sides.

Here are the downsides. The volunteers.

They are the most important source for the survival of open-source community, at least used to be.

They may feel unappreciated and the work being appropriated.

Here is a quote from a volunteer from JBoss application server.

Anybody here know about JBoss application server?

Okay, just one person. Anyway, it's a dominating open-source software on application server era.

And it's basically controlled by Redhead.

This guy said, it's tough to build a real community when you have paid committers and unpaid contributors working together to build the open-source community.

And things may get even worse. The volunteers may stop contributing.

For example, in the Linux kernel, the number of volunteers has been slowly declining in recent years.

So it's very natural to ask, is there a good way for a company to participate in open-source community?

We define hybrid as open-source software projects with commercial participation.

When a company joins an open-source community, it may have substantial impact on the community's newcomers and the retention of existing developers.

And I think everybody knows that these two aspects are very critical factors to the survival of open-source community.

Because newcomers bring new blood to the community and the retention requires time for people to become skilled at the software.

So in order to answer this big question, we selected three specific hybrid projects to answer the following specific research questions.

What policies and actions did the companies in these three projects employee to get involved in these three communities?

And what is the impact of the policies and actions? Did these policies and actions increase the inflow of new developers?

Did they improve the retention of existing contributors?

The three projects are JBoss Application Server hosted by JBoss Community. It's related to the company Red Hat.

Geronimo is hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. It's related to IBM.

And the third project is Jonas. It's hosted by OW2, an open-source consortium, and it's related to Bore, a French company.

Before I get into more details, I'm going to explain why we selected these three projects.

I think we all understand it's very difficult to separate one factor from many others for software development.

So to control for the variation in software development, we selected these three projects that develop the same specification in the similar time period.

What does that mean?

That means we could compare the three projects in the similar time period and implement the same technology specification.

So that means we could control for the external factors, including world economy and technology.

The second, we could control for the context, because we could compare different time periods for the same project.

Even a project has variations over time, but for the same project, it must have some constants over time, because it's the same project.

Eventually, we were a major contributor to one of the projects, that's Jonas.

That means we are familiar with the application server technology, and we know exactly how the technology evolves and varies.