COTS Software: The Economical Choice?
IEEE Software
Developing New Processes for COTS-Based Systems
IEEE Software
Not All CBS Are Created Equally: COTS-Intensive Project Types
ICCBSS '03 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on COTS-Based Software Systems
Risks and challenges of component-based software development
Communications of the ACM - Program compaction
An Empirical Study of Open-Source and Closed-Source Software Products
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Critical Look at Open Source
Computer
METRICS '04 Proceedings of the Software Metrics, 10th International Symposium
Managerial and technical barriers to the adoption of open source software
ICCBSS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on COTS-Based Software Systems
COTS and open source software components: are they really different on the battlefield?
ICCBSS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on COTS-Based Software Systems
Barriers to disseminating off-the-shelf based development theories to IT industry
MPEC '05 Proceedings of the second international workshop on Models and processes for the evaluation of off-the-shelf components
Observations on versioning of off-the-shelf components in industrial projects (short paper)
Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Software configuration management
An empirical study on decision making in off-the-shelf component-based development
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
A survey of software development with open source components in Chinese software industry
ICSP'07 Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Software process
Challenges in using open source software in product development: a review of the literature
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development
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Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components instead of building these themselves. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers use COTS components instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed in form of an international survey on motivation and risks of using OTS components, conducted in Norway, Italy and Germany. We have currently gathered data on 71 projects using only COTS components and 39 projects using only OSS components, and 5 using both COTS and OSS components. Results show that both COTS and OSS components were used in small, medium and large software houses and IT consulting companies. The overall software system also covers several application domains.Both COTS and OSS were expected to contribute to shorter time-to-market, less development effort and the application of newest technology. However, COTS users believe that COTS component should have good quality, technical support, and will follow the market trend. OSS users care more about the free ownership and openness of the source code. Projects using COTS components had more difficulties in estimating selection effort, following customer requirement changes, and controlling the component's negative effect on system security. On the other hand, OSS user had more difficulties in getting the support reputation of OSS component providers.