Proposing novel measures to alleviate the risks of migration to open source software Ehsan Noroozi Faculty of Computer Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran ehsannoroozi1371@yahoo.com Habib Seifzadeh (corresponding author) Faculty of Computer Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran Big Data Research Center, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran seifzadeh@iaun.ac.ir ABSTRACT Nowadays, companies and organizations pay more attention to the use of open source software. In this regard, organizations can benefit from the advantages of this kind of software, such as less cost and more flexibility. However, migration to open source software has its own risks, such as training of employee, lack of compatibility, and support. Reviewing numerous papers found in the literature, this study aims to collect a complete list of risks that may influence the open source migration process as much as possible. It also provides a new categorization of the risks by which each risk is classified based on its type (organizational, technical, and environmental), and its time of occurrence (before, during, and after migration). Moreover, this paper proposes a number of conceivable measures to mitigate each risk; some of them are proposed for the first time in this area of research. The results of this study can help organizations’ decision makers to make better decisions in the open source migration process. CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering ➝ Software creation and management ➝ Software post-development issues ➝ Maintaining software. Keywords Open source software; Software Migration; Software Maintenance; Risk; Risk Mitigation. 1. INTRODUCTION Legacy systems are systems that are difficult to maintain due to the complexity and lack of required skills, documentations, and their specific architecture with highly dependent layers. These systems might have been implemented by old programming language or technology. In addition, the structure of these applications could have downgraded on the basis of changes and their documentation may be outdated. All of these problems make legacy systems inflexible against emerging technologies and changes [1]. On the other hand, legacy systems are still in use and commercially considerable. Therefore, replacing these types of software may have cost and risk associated with it [2]. Replacing legacy systems with open source software can be considered as an alternative. Open source software is a software with licenses that specify user rights to use, distribution by modifying or without modifying software [3]. In another definition, open source software is a free software that publishes with its code, and includes permissions that allow the user to modify and re-publish the software [4]. In addition to the features offered for open source software, there are other features, such as the cooperation of a large number of volunteers without the cost of developing open source software [5]. One of the most important discussions which comes with the open source migration process is the risks involved in this process. In other words, the problems that may occur during this process must be discovered, investigated and managed before the process has performed, to avoid potential and unavoidable problems. In this paper, by reviewing various articles on open source software migration, a new categorization of risks type in the migration process has also been presented. We categorize risks into 3 categories, before-migration, during-migration and after-migration risks, and 2 technical and organizational sub-categories. Regarding the importance of risks, there are some solutions for each of them. These solutions come from valid articles and resources. According to the background of the authors of this article on migration, in some cases supplementary solutions are also provided by the authors of this paper. This paper contains five sections. The second section describes how the articles have been selected along with the review and discussion of them. In Section 3, the risks and solutions to avoid them are gathered and categorized. In addition, the author’s solutions to the risks are proposed. In Section 4, the results of this study are presented. In the last section, summaries and future work are presented. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW We used systematic literature review (SLR), in order to review all articles and documents related to open source software migration. Based on this, we gathered related articles from 6 digital libraries including Science Direct, Web of Science, IEEExplore, ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar, and Springer. Collected articles, regardless of the type of paper, were in the fields of open source software, legacy software and migration. Articles that were published before 2002 were put away. Furthermore, the articles published after 2002, but the number of their citations were low Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. ICCMS 2018, January 8–10, 2018, Sydney, Australia © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6339-6/18/01…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3177457.3177478 134