Organizational adoption of open source software

Abstract

a b s t r a c tOrganizations and individuals can use open source software (OSS) for free, they can study its internal workings, and they can even fix it or modify it to make it suit their particular needs. These attributes make OSS an enticing technological choice for a company. Unfortunately, because most enterprises view technology as a proprietary differentiating element of their operation, little is known about the extent of OSS adoption in industry and the key drivers behind adoption decisions. In this article we examine factors and behaviors associated with the adoption of OSS and provide empirical findings through data gathered from the US Fortune-1000 companies. The data come from each company's web browsing and serving activities, gathered by sifting through more than 278 million web server log records and analyzing the results of thousands of network probes. We show that the adoption of OSS in large US companies is significant and is increasing over time through a low-churn transition, advancing from applications to platforms. Its adoption is a pragmatic decision influenced by network effects. It is likelier in larger organizations and those with many less productive employees, and is associated with IT and knowledge-intensive work and operating efficiencies.

Open Source Projects as Incubators of Innovation: From Niche Phenomenon to Integral Part of the Software Industry

“…This applies all the more since open source software can be tested by the developers themselves and adapted to their respective requirements with little administrative effort (Spinellis & Giannikas 2012).…”

Open Source Adoption in Health Sector: Understanding the Stakeholder Relationships in a Resource Constrained Setting

“…Higher quality (security, reliability, flexibility), low total cost of ownership, and no vendor lock-ins are among the main advantages of open source software to an organization (Gwebu & Wang, 2011). However, generic design, limited documentation, lack of training opportunities, overwhelming version proliferations and constraints imposed by various FOSS license are the known challenges in implementing open source solutions (Spinellis & Giannikas, 2012).…”

“…The paper concludes by proposing a model to understand the stakeholder interactions with respect to FOSS implementation governance. EJISDC (2017) Spinellis and Giannikas (2012) further divided this process in to primary and secondary adoption of FOSS. Primary adoption is where management decides that a particular HIS is required to support a perceived need (top-down implementation), whereas, secondary adoption is concerns the operational level processes to achieve this integration.…”

An MADM risk-based evaluation-selection model of free-libre open source software tools

“…Other acceptance reinforcement has been provided by large and well-recognized IT firms like IBM, Sun, and Google that have promoted the creation of FLOSS communities or have promoted the utilization of some FLOSS products (Nagy et al, 2010;Spinellis and Giannikasa, 2012). For instance, IBM supports the Java Eclipse platform, Sun the Netbeans platform, and Google the massive utilization of Linux Operating Systems (Spinellis and Giannikasa, 2012). In particular, the organization SourceForge.net keeps a database over 130,000 FLOSS projects.…”