A promising way to support software reuse is based on Component-Based Software Development (CBSD). Open Source Software (OSS) products are increasingly available that can be freely used in product development. However, OSS communities still face several challenges before taking full advantage of the “reuse mechanism”: many OSS projects duplicate effort, for instance when many projects implement a similar system in the same application domain and in the same topic. One successful counter-example is the FFmpeg multimedia project; several of its components are widely and consistently reused in other OSS projects. Documented is the evolutionary history of the various libraries of components within the FFmpeg project, which presently are reused in more than 140 OSS projects. Most use them as black-box components; although a number of OSS projects keep a localized copy in their repositories, eventually modifying them as needed (white-box reuse). In both cases, the authors argue that FFmpeg is a successful project that provides an excellent exemplar of a reusable library of OSS components.
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Reuse of software components is one of the most promising practices of software engineering (Basili & Rombach, 1991). Enhanced productivity (as less code needs to be written), increased quality (since assets proven in one project can be carried through to the next) and improved business performance (lower costs, shorter time-to-market) are often pinpointed as the main benefits of developing software from a stock of reusable components (Sametinger, 1997; Sommerville, 2004).
Although much research has focused on the reuse of Off-The-Shelf (OTS) components, both Commercial OTS (COTS) and Open Source Software (OSS), in corporate software production (Li et al., 2009; Torchiano & Morisio, 2004), the reusability of OSS projects in other OSS projects has only recently started to draw the attention of researchers and developers in OSS communities (Lang et al., 2005; Mockus, 2007; Capiluppi & Boldyreff, 2008). A vast amount of code is created daily, modified and stored in OSS repositories, and the inherent philosophy around OSS is indeed promoting reuse. Yet, software reuse in OSS projects is hindered by various factors, psychological and technical. For instance, the project to be reused could be written in a programming language that the hosting project dislikes or is incompatible with; the hosting project might not agree with the design decisions made by the project to be reused; finally, individuals in the hosting project may dislike individuals involved in the project to be reused (Senyard & Michlmayr, 2004). A search for the “email client” topic in the SourceForge repository (http://ffmpeg.org/), and its build-level components, and to show how some of these components are currently reused in other projects. This project is a cornerstone in the multimedia domain; several dozens of OSS projects reuse parts of FFmpeg, one of the most widely reused being the libavcodec component. In the domain of OSS multimedia applications, libavcodec is the most widely adopted and reused audio/video codec (coding and decoding) resource. Its reuse by other OSS projects is so widespread since it represents a crosscutting resource for a wide range of systems, from single-user video and audio players to converters and multimedia frameworks. As such, FFmpeg represents a unique case (Yin, 2003, p.40), which is why we selected the project for this study.