  Marketplaces for distributing software products and services have been
getting increasing popularity. GitHub, which is most known for its version
control functionality through Git, launched its own marketplace in 2017. GitHub
Marketplace hosts third party apps and actions to automate workflows in
software teams. Currently, this marketplace hosts 440 Apps and 7,878 Actions
across 32 different categories. Overall, 419 Third party developers released
their apps on this platform which 111 distinct customers adopted. The
popularity and accessibility of GitHub projects have made this platform and the
projects hosted on it one of the most frequent subjects for experimentation in
the software engineering research. A simple Google Scholar search shows that
24,100 Research papers have discussed GitHub within the Software Engineering
field since 2017, but none have looked into the marketplace. The GitHub
Marketplace provides a unique source of information on the tools used by the
practitioners in the Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystem for automating their
project's workflow. In this study, we (i) mine and provide a descriptive
overview of the GitHub Marketplace, (ii) perform a systematic mapping of
research studies in automation for open source software, and (iii) compare the
state of the art with the state of the practice on the automation tools. We
conclude the paper by discussing the potential of GitHub Marketplace for
knowledge mobilization and collaboration within the field. This is the first
study on the GitHub Marketplace in the field.
