A three-layer view model of OSS: Toward understanding of diversity of OSS

Open source software (OSS) is becoming increasingly visible in the software industry. The entire social and commercial fabric supporting the creation of software is changing. OSS is a global distributed community-oriented model of software development with OSS-oriented licenses. This characteristic of OSS has created a wide range of diversity and heterogeneity in OSS. In order to achieve management, evaluation, measure readiness, and leveraging of ecosystems, it is important to decompose the complexity, diversity, and heterogeneity of OSS. The author analyzes seven aspects of OSS in order to help construct a new model to achieve this goal. Then, the author proposes a three-layer view model of OSS in order to position the seven aspects for in-depth analysis of OSS.