Top-Down Adoption of OSS

Abstract

In this chapter, the reasons why OSS might be introduced to the corporation in a top-down fashion will be looked at. For this, I will assume the role of top-management to understand its evaluation of OSS. Management can be expected to decide in favor of corporate OSS engagement and initiate its top-down adoption if they see that this would be beneficial to the corporation and against it when the downsides outweigh the advantages. In the course of this chapter, I will thus analyze if and under which conditions this decision can be expected to be in favor of OSS.

I am indebted to Robert Simm and Josef Waltl for their help in creating this part of my thesis. Section 3.1 employs the dataset Mr. Simm built in his Diplom thesis. Mr. Waltl’s Master’s thesis showed the general feasibility of an event study as shown by Section 3.2. The results presented herein are a substantial expansion of his work employing an updated and largely expanded dataset. I would further like to thank Jörn Block, Joachim Henkel, and Simone Käs for several helpful comments and Hans Zischka for valuable assistance in data collection.