Spicing Up Open Source Development with a Touch of Crowdsourcing

Leveraging the work and innovation of third party developers has risen as a viable business model for software companies. Most obviously, open source software has become an opportune ecosystem for creating innovative products with minimum number of paid developers. Then, having a company core where most of the development is done in-house by developers employed by the company can lead to a situation where the community contributions are not smoothly integrated into the code base of the open source product. Similarly, during the last decade, the use of the specialized workforce available online - so-called crowdsourcing - has received a lot of attention. While tapping into the unknown group of experts differs from the open source community-driven approach, they share certain similarities as well. In this paper, we present results of an initial study on how adopting and utilizing elements from crowdsourcing can help to boost community contributions in company lead development of an open source software product. We further discuss how such activity can be supported by an in-house development model where all contributions whether done by the developers of the company or community participants enter a common, automated integration pipeline.