Generations of OSS in evolutionary paths: Toward an understanding of where OSS is heading

Open source software (OSS) is becoming increasingly visible throughout 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 an OSS-oriented license. This characteristic of OSS has created a wide range of diversity and heterogeneity in OSS. With less shared common ground, the number of OSS projects continues to grow and involve an increasing number of people. The author compares different arguments regarding different generations of OSS and presents the implications of the multiple views on the evolution of OSS.