Patterns of Free Revealing – Balancing Code Sharing and Protection in Commercial Open Source Development

Commercial firms increasingly contribute to the development of open source software (OSS). However, a conflict often arises between the requirements of the General Public License to make “derived work” available, and firms’ interest to protect their intellectual property embodied in the code. If there are ways to mitigate or solve this conflict, the conditions under which OSS will be an appealing solution to firms become much more general. This paper is the first to provide a quantitative empirical study of this conflict and the ways firms deal with it. I present a study of embedded Linux, based on an online-survey that yielded 268 valid responses. It turns out that firms routinely use various means to protect their developments, while keeping the GPL. Still, they do reveal a considerable share of their code— on average, 49%. Heterogeneity between firms is analyzed using multivariate analysis. I show how the relative importance of various benefits and downsides of revealing determines a firm’s pattern of revealing. An analysis of reported reasons for revealing and of the type of code that is revealed provides further insights into these patterns. Putting the different dimensions of revealing behavior together, I find that consistent patterns of revealing can be identified for different types of firms.