Managing a Corporate Open Source Asset

01 January 2010

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We define corporate open source (COS) as applying the precepts and methodologies prevalent in the open source development community to creating industrial-strength software projects in a corporation for internal use. It may seem that open source components usually developed using less rigorous processes and a non-existent to minimal fiscal incentive structure may not be a good model for creating commercial software; however, our ongoing work in this area indicates that corporations can benefit from open source development techniques. In this paper, we present two methods to manage COS projects, and expand in detail on one of them. Our results indicate that COS projects differ markedly from their traditional open source counterparts in the notable amount of support business divisions within a corporation require to successfully leverage the shared asset.