Open Source Software Usage Implications in the Context of Software Development

Open source software (OSS) is becoming increasingly popular in several aspects of software engineering activities, ranging from using OSS for development or execution environments to incorporating OSS directly into developed products. OSS and its development projects differ from proprietary software and closed source projects in several aspects. Therefore, these aspects should be known and analyzed, before making a decision for using OSS in a software development project. This paper analyses various OSS usage strategies in the context of software development projects. Dependent on cases of usage, different open source project collaboration models, based on business process models, are analyzed from several relevant aspects.