The adoption of open source software in business models

Abstract

Free / Libre open source software (FLOSS/OSS) has gained increasing popularity and utilisation in commercial and governmental organisations. Universities like Harvard and Stanford now offer courses on open source as a business and also on how businesses can compete with open source firms. However, very little research has been published in regards to the influence of OSS on business strategies; the use of OSS as a viable business or its value proposition within a commercial entity. The business model, a powerful tool for extracting economic value from the potential of technological innovation, clearly plays an important role in the success of a business. In this paper we investigate the role of open source in the business models of Red Hat and IBM and describe how OSS has contributed to their success. A framework recently developed by some of the authors is used to evaluate and identify the key factors important to the integration of OSS strategies into traditional business models.

Open innovation using open source tools: a case study at Sony Mobile

“…These are important aspects and business drivers for the Tools department as Jenkins and Gerrit constitute the critical parts in Sony Mobile's continuous integration tool chain. From this perspective, a trend may be seen in how the different communities are becoming more professionalized in the sense that the tools make up business critical assets for many of the stakeholders in the communities, which motivates a continuous effort in risk-reduction (Munga et al 2009;Henkel 2006).…”

How commercial involvement affects open source projects: three case studies on issue reporting

“…Naturally, the user experience on the websites like JIRA would be carefully nurtured. We interviewed one core developer on JBoss community day 19) , who confirmed that the usual way for JBoss developers to handle user issues in the first place. Moreover, shunting external issues to the forum and keeping the issue tracking system more professional in JBossAS helped with the rapid resolution of user issues.…”

“…There are also some empirical studies on successful hybrid projects. These enable us to understand how to improve upon existing software development practices, e.g., the analysis of business strategies [1,19] and development methodology [20]. In particular, Wagstrom et al [21] provided an in-depth analysis of commercial involvement in the GNOME and Eclipse software projects, and measured the impact of two kinds of commercial involvement, namely community-focused and product-focused, on the participation http://engine.scichina.com/doi/10.1007/s11432-013-4914-6 of volunteers.…”

Open Source Software Resilience Framework

“…Commercial features: 0 (no) or 1 (yes) based on whether the OSS project offers commercial features or a pro (paid) version. The indicator was based to the work of [18]. 0 is considered a non resilient value.…”