Companies' domination in FLOSS development: an empirical study of OpenStack

Because of the increasing acceptance and possibly expanding market of free/libre open source software (FLOSS), the spectrum and scale of companies that participate in FLOSS development have substantially expanded in recent years. Companies get involved in FLOSS projects to acquire user innovations [3, 12], to reduce costs [8, 11], to make money on complementary services [13], etc. Such intense involvement may change the nature of FLOSS development and pose critical challenges for the sustainability of the projects. For example, it has been found that a company's full control and intense involvement is associated with a decrease of volunteer inflow [13]. Sometimes a project may fail after one company pulls resources from the project [13]. This raises concerns about the domination of one company in a project. In large projects like OpenStack, there are often hundreds of companies involved in contributing code. Despite substantial researches on commercial participation, whether or not one company dominates a project and the impact of such domination has never been explicitly explored. We investigate four main projects of OpenStack, a large ecosystem that has had a tremendous impact on computing and society, to answer the following research questions: Does one company dominate the project's development (RQ1)? If the answer to RQ1 is yes, does the domination affect the community (RQ2)?