A Comparative Study of Challenges in Integrating Open Source Software and Inner Source Software

Several large software-developing organizations have adopted Open Source Software development (OSSD) practices to develop in-house components that are subsequently integrated into products. This phenomenon is also known as “Inner Source”. While there have been several reports of successful cases of this phenomenon, little is known about the challenges that practitioners face when integrating software that is developed in such a setting.

We have identified a number of challenges and approaches to address them, and compared the findings to challenges related to development with OSS products reported in the literature. We found that many challenges identified in the case study could be mapped to challenges related to integration of OSS. The results provide important insights into common challenges of developing with OSS and Inner Source and may help organizations to understand how to improve their software development practices by adopting certain OSSD practices. The findings also identify the areas that need further research.