Towards a Product Model of Open Source Software in a Commercial Environment

Commercial organizations show increasing interest in using and improving Open Source (OS) software -- they want to participate in the OS community, but still have commercial interests. We believe there is not necessarily a conflict of interests, and the OS community can gain from the participation of commercial organizations. But this special situation requires a sound understanding of how open source development works. In this paper we describe the process of developing OSS in a commercial environment. We identify which work products have to be built up and discuss the differences between traditional open source development without financial interest and commercial OS development. The described process model also focuses on licenses, tool support and infrastructures. The concept we introduce is based on an evaluation of different projects and case studies