The significance of researching the open-source software supply chain lies in gaining a deep understanding and effectively managing dependency relationships, evolution trends, security, and sustainability in software development. This ultimately enhances the success rate, quality, and security of software projects. This introductory chapter first introduces four fundamental concepts related to the management and maintenance of the open-source software supply chain. Next, we comprehensively collected authoritative journal papers and conference papers from the past two decades (2001–2024) in the field, covering empirical studies, case studies, metric methods and analysis frameworks, techniques, tools, and other aspects. We provide an overview of the research status and trends in the open-source software supply chain by analyzing fundamental information such as publication dates, publishing journals, and the types of major contributions found in each paper.