An exploratory study for effective COTS and OSS product marketing

Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) and Open Source Software (OSS) products have had significant impact on software development. The phenomenology of COTS-Based systems challenges the software community by emphasising the problems of COTS/OSS products identification, selection and evaluation. In this paper we address these problems by looking how the marketing of such COTS/OSS products can affect their identification and selection. We propose decisive factors that can help COTS/OSS product providers to market their products more effectively and assist users to conduct COTS/OSS product identification and selection more efficiently.