Outsourcing to an Unknown Workforce: Exploring Opensurcing as a Global Sourcing Strategy

Abstract

This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of the open source development model as a global sourcing strategy-opensourcing, as we term it here-whereby commercial companies and open source communities collaborate on development of software of commercial interest to the company. Building on previous research on information systems outsourcing, a theoretical framework for exploring the opensourcing phenomenon is derived.

Succeeding with contactless service innovations - strategic recommendations based on a comparative analysis of mobile business ecosystems in Norway

“…A business ecosystem describes a network of firms, which collectively produce a holistic, integrated technological system that creates value for end-users and customers (Adner, 2006;Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2008;Bahrami and Evans, 1996;Basole, 2009;Lusch, 2011;Teece, 2007;Le and Tarafdar, 2009). The firms within this ecosystem share user focus, system vision and enabling technologies.…”

A Historical Account of the Value of Free and Open Source Software: From Software Commune to Commercial Commons

“…While this development has been described by different authors e.g. [4,5,8,9,10,13,24,38], the conditions and circumstances enabling the transformation of FOSS has rarely been addressed.…”

'Letting go of Control' to Embrace Open Source: Implications for Company and Community

“…This paper builds on Agerfalk and Fitzgerald's discussion of open-sourcing [1]. However, while they discuss open-sourcing as 'outsourcing to an unknown workforce', we consider here large technology service companies that adopt open source code and actively engage with open source communities, often well established and of high repute, and do so in large part because this 'workforce', and its qualities, are very much known.…”

“…The opportunity offered by such engagement is evident for both small niche businesses (SME), and within the largest corporations. This movement to acquire code and associated resources from open source communities has been described under the term 'open-sourcing' [1][2][3], but also under other terms such as corporate source [4]. There are other terms in use that imply borrowing the ideology of sharing from open source but are not usually explicitly linked to open source such as insourcing [5], cosourcing [6], netsourcing [7], inner source [8] and crowdsourcing [9,10].…”

“…Here we report data drawn from a part of a larger EU funded study looking to open source models for guidance on how to create and sustain digital business ecosystems 1 . We present our initial findings from one part of this work, a field study undertaken within two large global technology services companies who use open source code and work with open source communities.…”