Abstract
In this chapter we discuss and illustrate opensourcing with case studies at IONA Technologies, Philips Healthcare and Telefonica. The chapter draws on the study reported by Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald (2008) and uses the set of company and community cues derived in that study (in the original publication, these were referred to as obligations). In the study, we asked both company and community interviewees to discuss their perceptions of their own obligations, and also the obligations they would expect from each other. It quickly emerged that many of these obligations were symmetrical; Table 2.1 presents a summary. The study represents an important step towards both (a) elaborating the software sourcing research agenda to incorporate also this novel and unconventional approach to global sourcing and co-opetition, and (b) bringing the under-explored area of company-led open source projects onto the open source research agenda, in particular the liberation of hitherto proprietary software. As noted above, most research on outsourcing has adopted a single perspective: the customer or the supplier (but most often focusing on the customer), while this study considered both the customer (in this case, the company) and the community obligations. This is important since although the cues are symmetrical to a large extent, they are also complementary, and there are differing emphases from each perspective, both sides of which must be fulfilled to achieve a successful opensourcing arrangement. The study also identifies the significant ways in which opensourcing differs from conventional outsourcing—the lack of a formal contract and requirements specification driven by the customer as well as the absence of payment in the conventional sense, for example.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Agarwal, R (2000) Individual Acceptance of Information Technologies, Framing The Domains of IT Management: Projecting the Future Through the Past, R. W. Zmud (ed.), Cincinnati, OH: Pinnaflex Press, pp. 85-104.
Ågerfalk, PJ (2013) Embracing diversity through mixed methods research, European Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 251-256.
Ågerfalk, PJ (2015) Insufficient theoretical contribution: A conclusive rationale for rejection? European Journal of Information Systems, Vol 23, No 6, pp. 593-599
Ågerfalk, PJ and Fitzgerald, B (2008) Outsourcing to an Unknown Workforce: Exploring Opensourcing as a Global Sourcing Strategy, MIS Quarterly, Vol 32, No. 3, pp. 385-410
Brandenburger, AM, and Nalebuff, BJ (1996) Co-Opetition: A Revolution Mindset That Combines Competition and Co-operation, New York: Doubleday.
Chatterjee, D, Grewal, R, and Sambamurthy, V (2002) Shaping Up for E-Commerce: Institutional Enablers of the Organizational Assimilation of Web Technologies, MIS Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 65-89.
Dinh-Trong, T, and Bieman, JM (2004) Open Source Software Development: A Case Study of FreeBSD, in Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Software Metrics, IEEE Computer Society.
Feller, J and Fitzgerald B (2002) Understanding Open Source Software Development. Pearson Education Ltd.
Fichman, RG (2004) Going Beyond the Dominant Paradigm for IT Innovation Research: Emerging Concepts and Methods, Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 5, No. 8, pp. 314-355.
Fitzgerald, B (2006) The Transformation of Open Source Software, MIS Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 587-598.
Gacek, C and Arief, B (2004) The many meanings of open source. IEEE Software Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 34-40.
Gallivan, M (2001) Organizational Adoption and Assimilation of Complex Technological Innovations: Development and Application of a New Framework, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 51-85.
Garvin, D (1993) Building a Learning Organization. Harvard Business Review Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 78-91.
German, DM (2005) Software Engineering Practices in the GNOME Project. In Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B, Hissam, SA, Lakhani, KR (Eds.) MIT Press
Goldman, R, and Gabriel, RP (2005) Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy, San Francisco: Morgan Kauffman Publishers.
Inkpen, AC (1996) Creating Knowledge through Collaboration, California Management Review Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 123-140.
Jørgensen, N (2005) Incremental and Decentralized Integration in FreeBSD. in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, J. Feller B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. Lakhani (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Lakhani, KR, and Wolf, RG (2005) Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects. in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, J. Feller B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. Lakhani (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Leonard-Barton, D (1995) Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Mockus, A and Herbsleb, JD (2002) Why Not Improve Coordination in Distributed Software Development by Stealing Good Ideas from Open Source?, in Meeting Challenges and Surviving Success: The Second Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, pp. 19-25.
Mockus, A, Fielding, RT, and Herbsleb, JD (2002) Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 309-346.
Moore, G (1999) Crossing the Chasm, Harper, NY
Nonaka, I (1991) The Knowledge-Creating Company, Harvard Business Review (69:6), pp. 96-104.
O’Mahony, S (2005) Non-Profit Foundations and Their Role in Community-Firm Software Collaboration, in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, J. Feller B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. Lakhani (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 393-414.
Raymond, ES (2001) The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O’Reilly Media.
Riehle, D, Riemer, P, Kolassa, C, and Schmidt, M (2014) Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source. In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Science. pp. 3286-3295.
Scacchi, W (2002) Understanding the Requirements for Developing Open Source Software Systems, IEE Proceedings—Software Vol. 149, No. 1, pp. 24-39.
Venkatesh, V, Brown, S A, and Bala H (2013) Bridging the qualitative–quantitative divide: guidelines for conducting mixed methods research in information systems. MIS Quarterly 36(1), 21-54.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ågerfalk, P.J., Fitzgerald, B., Stol, KJ. (2015). Opensourcing. In: Software Sourcing in the Age of Open. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17266-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17266-8_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17265-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17266-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)