Exposing Differences of Governance Approaches in Single and Multi Vendor Open Source Software Development

Research confirms that commercial OSS exists in many different ways according to its revenue model, type of license, development style, number of participating firms, number of participating volunteers or governance mode. In order to differentiate between an increasing variety of commercialization approaches, one may distinguish between projects with one dominating company, so called single vendor projects and those where more than one company is active, so called multi vendor projects. Furthermore, in order to structure different approaches, a project’s history is equally of importance in terms of whether a project was initiated by a firm or a community. In this paper, we therefore analyze and compare single and multi vendor as well as firm initiated and community initiated OSS projects with regard to technical contribution of voluntary and paid project members. Based on a dataset build upon Eclipse projects we expose, that the number of paid members is significantly higher in firm initiated and multi vendor projects.