Successful Reuse of Software Components: A Report from the Open Source Perspective

A promising way of software reuse is Component-Based
Software Development (CBSD). There is an increasing number of OSS
products available that can be freely used in product development. How-
ever, OSS communities themselves have not yet taken full advantage of
the “reuse mechanism”. Many OSS projects duplicate effort and code,
even when sharing the same application domain and topic. One suc-
cessful counter-example is the FFMpeg multimedia project, since several
of its components are widely and consistently reused into other OSS
projects. This paper documents the history of the libavcodec library
of components from the FFMpeg project, which at present is reused in
more than 140 OSS projects. Most of the recipients use it as a black-
box component, although a number of OSS projects keep a copy of it in
their repositories, and modify it as such. In both cases, we argue that
libavcodec is a successful example of reusable OSS library of compo-
nents.