Feature-based determination of product line asset types. In-house, COTS, or open source?

One important activity in product line engineering is product line production planning, during which stakeholders of a product line determine what and how product line assets are developed and used for product development. Moreover, decisions on which assets should be developed as in-house assets or purchased as COTS are made. Recently, there have been increasing interests in using open source software for product development. It seems reasonable to make some common components of a product line as open source software or acquire them from exiting open source communities. However, it is still not clear what a "common" component means and how it can be identified. Therefore, we need a systematic approach or guidelines that can be used to determine which product line assets to be developed as open source software. In this position paper, we propose a feature-based approach to identifying product line assets and determining their development strategies during product line production planning.