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Methodol."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>To achieve commercial goals, companies have made substantial contributions to large open-source software (OSS) ecosystems such as OpenStack and have become the main contributors. However, they often withdraw their employees for a variety of reasons, which may affect the sustainability of OSS projects. While the turnover of individual contributors has been extensively investigated, there is a lack of knowledge about the nature of companies\u2019 withdrawal. To this end, we conduct a mixed-methods empirical study on OpenStack to reveal how common company withdrawals were, to what degree withdrawn companies made contributions, and what the rationale behind withdrawals was. By analyzing the commit data of 18 versions of OpenStack, we find that the number of companies that have left is increasing and even surpasses the number of companies that have joined in later versions. Approximately 12% of the companies in each version have exited by the next version. Compared to the sustaining companies that joined in the same version, the withdrawn companies tend to have a weaker contribution intensity but contribute to a similar scope of repositories in OpenStack. Through conducting a developer survey, we find four aspects of reasons for companies\u2019 withdrawal from OpenStack: company, community, developer, and project. The most common reasons lie in the company aspect, i.e., the company either achieved its goals or failed to do so. By fitting the survival analysis model, we find that commercial goals are associated with the probability of the company\u2019s withdrawal, and that a company\u2019s contribution intensity and scale are positively correlated with its retention. Maintaining good retention is important but challenging for OSS ecosystems, and our results may shed light on potential approaches to improve company retention and reduce the negative impact of company withdrawal.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3510849","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,3,21]],"date-time":"2022-03-21T12:37:19Z","timestamp":1647866239000},"page":"1-24","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":17,"title":["Turnover of Companies in OpenStack: Prevalence and Rationale"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"31","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9371-5931","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yuxia","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China"}]},{"given":"Hui","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China"}]},{"given":"Xin","family":"Tan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beijing, China"}]},{"given":"Minghui","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China"}]},{"given":"Zhi","family":"Jin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China"}]},{"given":"Jiaxin","family":"Zhu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,7,12]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3390\/ijgi6110340"},{"issue":"1","key":"e_1_3_2_3_2","first-page":"17","article-title":"Defining small and medium enterprises: A critical review","volume":"1","author":"Berisha G.","year":"2015","unstructured":"G. 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