Software Configuration Management Issues with Industrial Opensourcing

The industrial involvement in Open Source Software projects is increasing. More and more companies are turning their proprietary code into open source, contribute actively to the development of Open Source Software projects or/and use Open Source Software products as (part of) their own products. Software Configuration Management provides the infrastructure that is the foundation for any type of software project. It facilitates the co-ordination and communication between the various participants on a software development team. Many problems and challenges from industrial involvement in Open Source Software projects have been identified in experience reports and research papers. A good part of these can be related to either absence of Software Configuration Management or a mismatch between what is done and what is needed for a particular setup. Many companies are used to Software Configuration Management in a homogeneous and localized setup and are confused about how to behave when the setup changes to a heterogeneous and distributed setting. In this short paper, we investigate Software Configuration Management lessons learned from the industrial participation in Open Source Software projects of two major telecommunications companies. We address what challenges can appear and discuss strategies to deal with these challenges.