Open Stack

Dear OpenStacker,


I am a researcher from Peking University. My colleague (Minghui Zhou, Zhi Jin, Xin Tan) and I are investigating the impacts that company’s domination may have on OSS community. The domination indicates the extent of contribution from the  company which contributed the largest fraction of commits or manpower among all companies. Since so many companies step in open source today, we expect this could help people better understand the practices and build better ecosystems. 

We understood you have contributed a lot to OpenStack ecosystems. So we think your experiences will greatly help this study and we truly hope you will be kindly enough to reply this questionnaire. 

The questionnaire is opening on this website and links are as follows：https://sojump.com/jq/15822929.aspx. In order to avoid the website can not be opened, we have all the questions in this mail as following. Please note all the answers will be kept anonymous and only for research purpose.

We define two metrics to characterize the company’s domination in an OSS project. One emphasizes on the degree of the dominating company's contribution, the value is obtained by dividing the company's commits (or manpower) by all commits (or manpower) contributed in the project per version. The other measures the balance of the intensity of all companies’ contribution (‘Shannon entropy’). The metrics we defined cover two aspects that directly influence the software development process: code and manpower. With this set of metrics, we investigated the history of four core projects of OpenStack, Nova, Swift, Neutron and Glance and obtained some rules.

1.       What kind of contributor are you? (Single Choice)

A.   Volunteer

B.   Hired by company

2.       We found a correlation between the extent of contribution from the most invested company (which contributed the largest fraction of commits or manpower among all companies) and the company turnover (joining and leaving of companies). For example, when the commits or manpower, contributed by the most invested company, is increasing, the number of companies who stayed in this project will decrease. 

         i.            Does it match your perception of what happened in OpenStack? (Single Choice) 

A.   highly unlikely 

B.   unlikely 

C.   hard to tell 

D.   likely 

E.    very likely  

        ii.            Does it match your perception of what you observed in FLOSS projects in general? (Single Choice) 

A.   highly unlikely 

B.   unlikely 

C.   hard to tell 

D.   likely 

E.    very likely

      iii.            Do you think what might have caused that?

      iv.            As a contributor, what are the factors that might prompt you to leave an open source project? (Multiple Choice)

A.   My company’s decision or business needs

B.   Lack of leisure time 

C.   Have no interests any more 

D.   ______ (other)

        v.            As a contributor, what are the factors that might prompt you to continue to stay on an open source project? (Multiple Choice)

A.   My company’s decision

B.   Project’s high popularity

C.   Have great interests 

D.   ______ (other)

3.        We found a positive correlation between the extent of contribution from the most invested company (which contributed the largest fraction of commits or manpower among all companies) and contributors’ average efficiency. For example, when the commits or manpower, contributed by the most invested company, is increasing, the average number of contributors’ commits per version will increase.

         i.            Does it match your perception of what happened in OpenStack?        (Single Choice)

A.   highly unlikely 

B.   unlikely 

C.   hard to tell 

D.   likely 

E.    very likely 

        ii.            Does it match your perception of what you observed in FLOSS projects in general? (Single Choice) 

A.   highly unlikely 

B.   unlikely 

C.   hard to tell 

D.   likely 

E.    very likely

      iii.            Do you think which factors below might cause the increasing of contributors’ average efficiency? (Multiple Choice)

A.   Dominated company may provide a team for review 

B.   Have common milestone leading by dominated company

C.   Personal experience and skills

D.   ______ (other)

      iv.            Do you think which factors below might cause the decreasing of contributors’ average efficiency?

A.   Code used to implement different features may lead to conflicts

B.   Communication problems

C.   Personal experience and skills

D.   ______ (other)

4.        We found a positive correlation between the extent of contribution from the most invested company (which contributed the largest fraction of commits or manpower among all companies) and the quality of issue reports. 

         i.            Does it match your perception of what happened in OpenStack?        (Single Choice)

A.   highly unlikely 

B.   unlikely 

C.   hard to tell 

D.   likely 

E.    very likely 

        ii.            Does it match your perception of what you observed in FLOSS projects in general? (Single Choice) 

A.   highly unlikely 

B.   unlikely 

C.   hard to tell 

D.   likely 

E.    very likely

      iii.            Do you think what might have caused that?

      iv.            When you participate in a new project, which kind of tasks would you prefer to do firstly? (Multiple Choice)

A.   Report issues 

B.   Fix bugs

C.   Write documentations

D.   Implement features

E.    ______ (other)

5.        Do you have any comments about how things go due to company’s domination in OSS projects? 







Thanks a lot if you could offer any insights! Sorry if this bothers you. 







Yuxia Zhang, Xin Tan, Minghui Zhou, and Zhi Jin

Key Laboratory of High Con dence Software Technologies, Peking University, Beijing, China 100871
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