A Model of Open Source Software-Based Product Line Development

Software product line (SPL) and open source software (OSS) have emerged as successful modes of developing software. There is an increased interest in developing suitable approaches for combining the promised advantages of SPL and OSS. Researchers and practitioners have been emphasizing the need of exploiting the ever growing repositories of OSS components for developing SPLs. However, there is no conceptual model for guiding the process of developing OSS-based SPLs. In this paper, we propose a model for developing software product line using open source software. This paper identifies and elaborates the essential phases and activities of the proposed model of developing OSS-based SPLs. This model emphasizes the vital role of software architecture and asserts that software architectures of OSS can be exploited to establish a SPL. To demonstrate this, we have evaluated Eclipse's architecture for its potential to support different flavors of a system.