Promoting the Penguin: Who Is Advocating Open Source Software in Commercial Settings?

Abstract

Author Biographies Oliver Alexy holds a degree in management of information systems from the University of Regensburg, Germany. A PhD student at TUM Business School, Technische Universität München, he is engaged in research into the incentives that lead corporations and individuals to participate in, and the processes followed by, open source software development and open innovation.

Understanding Open Source in an Industrial Context

“…Other classifications of how OSS is used in an industrial context exist and highlight other aspects than the one highlighted by this paper. One such example uses the following three categories: using existing OSS, contributing to existing OSS projects, and releasing proprietary software under an OSS license [1].…”

Myths and Realities About Online Forums in Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Study

“…Indeed Zeitlyn [9] compared the relationship of OSS developers and their projects to that of parents and their children, in as much as parents always give everything to their children without expecting anything in return. In addition to this reasoning a number of other benefits of OSS have been identified [25,27,28,29,30]. Acquisition cost of OSS is generally lower than proprietary software and may even be completely free of cost and thus may eliminate the financial burdens of proprietary licensing schemes.…”

Migration Discourse Structures: Escaping Microsoft’s Desktop Path

“…Second, roles and preferences of individual actors change during the process, converting some of them from opponents into proponents and vice-versa. It is, therefore, impossible -or at least, misleading -to simply reduce individual attitudes towards the adoption of Free and Open Source Software to their job functions as it is tried by Alexy and Henkel [1], and underlines the importance of applying a process perspective in researching adoption decisions. Third, external advice and 4 Although all departments had adopted the same operating system (Windows NT), its set up in terms of administration tools, settings, and support software varied.…”

“…[22]) and do not distinguish between desktop and server usage (e.g. [1]), the organizational processes associated with these migrations are often overlooked or underrated.…”

“…But aside these aspects the migration decision and process in Munich is also a critical case [34] for studying why and how organizations take the lead in adopting a minority system in markets with strong network effects, often referred to as "path dependent" [6,3] 1 . Whereas many studies of FOSS adoption, especially in the domain of information systems, focus on technical implementation and migration issues (e.g.…”