Free Revealing (eBook)

Dr. Oliver Alexy war Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter bei Prof. Dr. Joachim Henkel am Dr. Theo Schöller-Stiftungslehrstuhl für Technologie- und Innovationsmanagement der Technischen Universität München und ist jetzt am Imperial College London tätig.

Foreword 6
Preface 7
Table of Contents 8
Detailed Table of Contents 9
List of Figures 12
List of Tables 13
List of Equations 15
List of Abbreviations 16
Zusammenfassung 18
Abstract 20
1 Introduction: Commercial Open Source Software 22
1.1 Development of the Open Source Phenomenon 22
1.2 Motivation 24
1.3 Research Questions 25
1.4 Research Context 26
1.5 Structural Outline 28
2 Open Source Software: Source of Innovation? 30
2.1 Definition and History of OSS 30
2.2 OSS as a Source of Innovation 37
2.3 Advantages and Disadvantages for Commercial Firms 45
2.4 Business Models around OSS 62
2.5 Implications for the Corporation and its Employees 71
3 Top-Down Adoption of OSS 74
3.1 Specifying the Potential of OSS Use for the Organization 74
3.2 Capital Market Evaluation of Releasing Source Code 85
4 Bottom-up Adoption of OSS 113
4.1 OSS vs. PCSS Development 114
4.2 Research Design 116
4.3 Effects of Cooperate OSS Adoption on Employees 119
4.4 Data and Methods 124
4.5 Results 131
4.6 Discussion and Implications 144
4.7 Exploratory Cluster Analysis 148
4.8 Conclusions 155
4.9 Summary: Top-down or Bottom-up 161
5 Managing OSS-related Processes 163
5.1 Benchmark Study 163
5.2 Developing a Model Process for Releasing Source Code 169
5.3 Managing Company-Owned OSS Projects 177
5.4 Conclusion 181
6 Motivation and Incentivizing of OSS Developers 183
6.1 Introduction 183
6.2 Theory and Hypotheses 185
6.3 Data and Method 192
6.4 Results 200
6.5 Discussion and Implications 204
6.6 Summary: Managing Corporate OSS Efforts 211
7 Summary and Outlook: OSS in the 21st Century 212
7.1 Suggestions for Further Research 213
7.2 The Future of Commercial OSS 215
Bibliography 216

3 Top-Down Adoption of OSS (S. 53-54)

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. Many organizations have already been using OSS for a long time, and many other firms that had once been faced with the question of whether to use OSS made a welleducated decision against it. Concerning the use of OSS in firms and its potential for top-down adoption, one can thus just ask top managers about their opinion on the use of OSS in firms to see which advantages or disadvantages are being perceived and whether the overall evaluation is negative or positive. This chapter will begin with such an evaluation in Section 3.1.

In order to measure the potential benefits of revealing source code, that is, contributing to existing OSS projects and, in particular, releasing proprietary software as OSS, an event study was conducted to capture the value-creating potential such actions may have as measured by changes in the firm’s market valuation. The change in stock price may also provide a more objective measure of the impact of releasing OSS on firm value as opposed to the probably more subjective and biased results that for example a survey might render. The findings of this study are presented in Section 3.2.54

3.1 Specifying the Potential of OSS Use for the Organization

To understand why firms eventually decide to adopt OSS, one first needs to understand how they evaluate OSS more specifically, that is, what they base their decision to adopt OSS on. For most organizations, the first contact with OSS they have is using OSS. As said in Section 2.3.1, this use can take two basic forms: (1) the firms may use OSS to support its processes (which may but do not have to include the software development process) and IS infrastructure and (2) the firm may develop a proprietary software product that builds on or extends existing OSS. Examples for (1) would be firms using popular desktop applications such as Open Office or Firefox, and also the software package Eclipse to deploy proprietary software, for (2), this could be an Internet application built on the Apache web server and the MySQL database.

In this section, I will focus on the second aspect of OSS use, analyzing why software firms might use OSS or OSS-based components in developing proprietary applications. As already shown in Section 2.3.1, the use of OSS and its integration as part or basis of a product developed by the organization are most often attributed with lower cost and quicker time-to-market. Yet, these rather general arguments make the use of OSS to develop proprietary software a black box, as for example not all phases of the software development cycle benefit from these possible advantages to an equal extent. For example, time-to-market will be mainly reduced due to the fact that less programming needs to be done by the corporation—while there will probably be little to no change with respect to design or testing.