Table 2 The relationship between two support entities
From: Support mechanisms provided by FLOSS foundations and other entities
Plug-ins/Add-ons | A FLOSS support entity may provide or produce plug-ins/add-ons to other FLOSS support entity projects and their products; for example, the Xfce desktop provides an add-on to Mozilla’s Thunderbird application. |
Sponsorship | A FLOSS support entity may provide funding or sponsorship to contributors to other FLOSS support entities and portfolio projects; for example, Twitter provides financial funding and contributes to the Apache Software Foundation, and Yahoo also provides financial funding to the OpenStack Foundation. |
Tie-ups | FLOSS project software might have a tie-up with other FLOSS support entity software. For example, Xfce and KDE desktops have tie-ups with Debian operating system. |
Packages | A FLOSS support entity may provide packages for other FLOSS products and services. For example, Homebrew provides packages for KDE desktop applications to install on OS X. Homebrew also provides packages to Mozilla’s add-ons on OS X. |
Reliance | A FLOSS support entity may use another FLOSS support entity software, service, infrastructure, tool or product for its own business operations and services; for example, Sony Mobile and Yahoo use the OpenStack platform infrastructure for their business purposes. |
Key persons | A key person—such as the founder, lead developer, maintainer or manager—from one FLOSS support entity might be employed by another FLOSS foundation. Both FLOSS support entities might have a single person as a common manager responsible for FLOSS projects; that is, a single person may act as a manager for both organizations’ projects. For example, Tarent Solutions Gmbh and the MirOS project have a single person managing their projects; the same person who founded the MirOS project is employed by Tarent Solutions Gmbh. |
Hosting | A FLOSS support organization might host and distribute other FLOSS support entity products and services; for example, BlackBerry hosts and distributes Adobe apps on BlackBerry World to BlackBerry mobiles. Moreover, a FLOSS support entity may provide generic modules and functions to work with other FLOSS support entity software implementations; for example, SaltStack provides generic modules and functions to work with the Apache Software Foundation implementation. |