Open source software has drawn more and more attention from researchers, developers and companies nowadays. Meanwhile, many Chinese technology companies are embracing open source and choosing to open source their projects. Nevertheless, most previous studies are concentrated on international companies such as Microsoft or Google, while the practical values of open source projects of Chinese technology companies remain unclear. To address this issue, we conduct a mixed-method study to investigate the landscape of projects open sourced by three large Chinese technology companies, namely Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). We study the categories and characteristics of open source projects, the developer's perceptions towards open sourcing effort for these companies, and the internationalization effort of their open source projects. We collected 1,000 open source projects that were open sourced by BAT in GitHub and performed an online survey that received 101 responses from developers of these projects. Some key findings include: 1) BAT prefer to open source frontend development projects, 2) 88\% of the respondents are positive towards open sourcing software projects in their respective companies, 3) 64\% of the respondents reveal that the most common motivations for BAT to open source their projects are the desire to gain fame, expand their influence and gain recruitment advantage, 4) respondents believe that the most common internationalization effort is "providing an English version of readme files", 5) projects with more internationalization effort (i.e., include an English readme file) are more popular. Our findings provide directions for software engineering researchers and provide practical suggestions to software developers and Chinese technology companies.
翻译:同时,许多中国技术公司正在接受开放源码,选择开放源码,选择开放源码项目。然而,大多数先前的研究都集中在微软或谷歌等国际公司,而中国技术公司开放源码项目的实际价值仍不清楚。为解决这一问题,我们开展了混合方法研究,以调查三个大型中国技术公司,即Baidu、Alibaba和Tententent(BAT)开放源软件项目的全景。我们研究了开放源码项目的类别和特点,开发商对这些公司的开放源码努力及其开放源码项目的国际化努力的看法。我们收集了1,000个开放源码项目,这些公司在GitHub的开放源码项目的实际价值仍然不明。为了解决这一问题,我们开展了一项在线调查,这些项目的开发商作出了101份答复。一些主要调查结果包括:(1) BAT更愿意开放源源码发展项目,即Baidu、Alibababa和Tentententent(BAT)对各自公司的开放源码软件项目的积极性,3⁄4 答卷者们认为开放源码项目最常见的动机是公开源码,他们最希望获得国际的学习成果。