JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Background: Currently having a software ecosystem is vital for many technology businesses. For this reason, understanding of software ecosystem and its benefits and also the elements of each software ecosystem can help business and software communities to emerge and orchestrate the products ecosystem optimally. Moreover, an interesting phenomenon in computer science and information technology is open source software and systems which enable users to participate in developing and using the software at many scales, from a simple mobile application to large-scale business systems and ICT applications. Objective: Study of open source software ecosystem (OSS-Ecosystem) and its roles, impacts and actors in software engineering domain will reveal how practitioners and researchers encounter open source software ecosystem and the results will be applicable to other software technology products and ICT business. The main goal is to understand how open source ecosystem can promote the products in a competitive market. Methods: There is a handful of systematic literature reviews published on the concepts of the software ecosystem. This study is an attempt to bring out the relevance of open source phenomenon and software ecosystem through systematic literature review principles. This research method will show the quality of the combination of these two subjects. Results: The research strategy resulted in 462 kinds of literature, from which 93 articles were chosen as the set of primary studies. The state-of-the- art of OSS-ecosystem is clearer by its definition. Model’s and actor’s lists are presented to give a better overview of the functionality of ecosystem. Eventually, advantages and other challenges of OSS-ecosystem are cited to deliver business opportunities. Conclusion: Through out the literature definitions found for OSS-ecosystems and few of them customized for OSS-ecosystem the requirement for the definition of single open source ecosystem is required. However, various models have been proposed. To understand the models’ functionality better, models are classified according to model purpose into five categories. Furthermore, important benefits and challenges extracted as a resource for decision-making process for projects or companies to make OSS-ecosystem foundation.