OSS integration issues and community support: an integrator perspective

The reuse and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) components provided by OSS communities is becoming an economical and strategic need for today’s organizations. The integration of OSS components provides many benefits, but also risks and challenges. One of the most important risks is the lack of effective and timely OSS community support for dealing with possible integration problems. For gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role played by OSS communities, we performed an exploratory study on 25 OSS integration projects from different European organizations. The results show that the main way of reducing integration problems was the use of OSS components from well-established communities; therefore very few integration problems were identified. In most of the cases these problems were successfully solved with the support from the OSS community and/or colleagues. In addition, contrary to the common belief that understanding code from someone else is a hard and undesirable task, some integrators consider OSS code even more understandable than their own code.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

United We Stand? Exploring the Willingness to Cooperate Amongst Open Source Service Providers

Open Source Software (OSS) is an increasingly hot topic in the business domain. The adoption of OSS in organizations has experienced an increasing uptake in the last decade. One of the key benefits mentioned is the unlimited access to the source code, which enables large communities to continuously improve a software application and prevents vendor lock-in. How attractive these benefits may be, the market for OSS however remains limited. This paper reports a study, undertaken in the Netherlands, amongst 206 Open Source Software Service providers (with a 34% response rate) to determine whether service providers wanted to cooperate in an Association that will set quality levels and guarantees to its members and their customers

Developer-Led Adoption of Open Source Software Libraries: A Conceptual Model

Researchers have historically viewed Open Source Software (OSS) as a homogenous group of technologies and assumed adoption behaviors are uniform among OSS types. Focus on specific OSS types is rare and OSS libraries, in particular, have been underrepresented. This paper recognizes the unique characteristics of OSS libraries and notes that their adoption may receive less organizational scrutiny than other software packages. A conceptual model based on an augmented theory of Task Technology Fit (TTF) is offered to provide insight into OSS library adoption. If supported, this model represents not only a theoretical contribution to the OSS literature, but a source of actionable information for practitioners engaged in software development

Software Licenses in Context: The Challenge of Heterogeneously-Licensed Systems

The prevailing approach to free/open source software and licenses has been that each system is developed, distributed, and used under the terms of a single license. But it is increasingly common for information systems and other software to be composed with components from a variety of sources, and with a diversity of licenses. This may result in possible license conflicts and organizational liability for failure to fulfill license obligations. Research and practice to date have not kept up with this sea-change in software licensing arising from free/open source software development. System consumers and users consequently rely on ad hoc heuristics (or costly legal advice) to determine which license rights and obligations are in effect, often with less than optimal results; consulting services are offered to identify unknowing unauthorized use of licensed software in information systems; and researchers have shown how the choice of a (single) specific license for a product affects project success and system adoption. Legal scholars have examined how pairs of software licenses conflict but only in simple contexts. We present an approach for understanding and modeling software licenses, as well as for analyzing conflicts among groups of licenses in realistic system contexts, and for guiding the acquisition, integration, or development of systems with free/open source components in such an environment. This work is based on an empirical analysis of representative software licenses and of heterogeneously-licensed systems. Our approach provides guidance for achieving a “best-of-breed” component strategy while obtaining desired license rights in exchange for acceptable obligations

A Market-Based Approach to Facilitate the Organizational Adoption of Software Component Reuse Strategies

Despite the theoretical benefits of software component reuse (and the abundance of component-based software development on the vendor side), the adoption of component reuse strategies at the organizational level (on the client side) remains low in practice. According to research, the main barrier to advancing component-based reuse strategies into a robust industrial process is coordination failures between software producers and their customers, which result in high acquisition costs for customers. We introduce a component reuse licensing model and combine it with a dynamic price discovery mechanism to better coordinate producers’ capabilities and customer needs. Using an economic experiment with 28 IT professionals, we investigate the extent to which organizations may be able to leverage component reuse for performance improvements. Our findings suggest that implementing component reuse can assist organizations in addressing the issue of coordination failure with software producers while also lowering acquisition costs. We argue that similar designs can be deployed in practice and deliver benefits to software development in organizations and the software industry

A Comprehensive Review and Synthesis of Open Source Research

The open source movement has grown steadily and matured in recent years, and this growth has been mirrored by a rise in open source related research. The objective of this paper is to pause and reflect on the state of the field. We start by conducting a comprehensive literature review of open source research, and organize the resulting 618 peer-reviewed articles into a taxonomy. Elements of this taxonomy are defined and described. We then draw on a number of existing categorization schemes to develop a framework to situate open source research within a wider nomological network. Building on concepts from systems theory, we propose a holistic framework of open source research. This framework incorporates current research, as represented by the taxonomy, identifies gaps and areas of overlap, and charts a path for future work

Understanding the Support Needs of System Integrators in a Software-as-a-Service based Independent Software Vendor

The partner ecosystem in the software world is constantly evolving and rapidly growing. Small to medium sized independent software vendors (ISVs) are constantly looking to globally expand and to create new synergies with other organizations or enterprises such as system integrators (SIs) to achieve global expansion. The support needs are often overlooked when trying to strategically partner with SIs. The goal of the research study is to understand the type of support needs that SIs expect from the ISVs and how they can be addressed via dynamic capabilities. This study focuses on the dynamic capabilities that can help ISVs address the support needs of SIs. The dynamic capabilities utilized in the study are integrative, combinative, knowledge management and stakeholder engagement. Furthermore, these capabilities also facilitate a more stable functioning of the operational capabilities in an ISV in a constantly changing environment. This study is performed and presented as a case study of a Finnish software company that specializes in delivering document management solution that is planning to engage with new partners specifically SIs in their partner ecosystem. A total of 20 interviewees, 10 from the case company and 10 from SIs participated to share their insights on what SIs expect out of ISVs. The interviews were focused on understanding the types of capabilities and competencies an ISV needs to have in-order to support the SIs. The findings indicated the support needs which were categorized into primary and secondary needs. This categorization is meant to help the case company understand the measure of investment and resources that are needed to address the needs via the implementation or improvement of the dynamic capabilities. Furthermore, this study contributes to the dynamic capabilities literature by providing a new perspective of how support needs in a partner ecosystem can be addressed by the capabilities

Openness of Innovation in Services and Software - Essays on Service Innovations, Open Source, and Hybrid Licensing Models

Open Innovation—and Open Source as its particular manifestation in the software industry—have recently been touted as cornerstones of competitiveness for firms in the new service economy and of value added by public institutions involved in the gathering, processing and publishing of information. Although the basic concepts are by no means new, a considerable surge in research literature has occurred over the past decade around the keywords of open source, open innovation, value co-creation and both innovation in general and service innovation in particular. Putting breakthrough inventions aside, I consider what exactly open innovation means: What qualifies as an innovation and how is it different from the plain old product or service development? Is open inherently better than closed, and what exactly is the difference between the two? What middle ground is there, if any? Services growing in importance, is open innovation in (software) services different from (open) innovation in software products? Besides, is there any real difference between software services and software products? Particularly, what is the role of customers in that extended open community around the firm? What is the value that they see vs. the value that the firm sees? In the four research publications in Part II of this dissertation, I am addressing these questions in more detail in various contexts: both from a purely software development and software business perspective and from a more general service development and innovation perspective. The four publications have more specific research questions and detailed implications, in addition to contributing to the general themes outlined above. They elaborate on the following topics: Different perspectives to value co-creation in services and the customer/supplier value construct; Roles of customers in service innovation activities in standardised services with transactional intent; The effect of adoption of open-source tools within a commercial for-profit organisation on the organisational structure itself; and Hybrid open-closed software licensing model as a platform for reverting from commoditised product business to higher-value customer relationships. Beyond the theoretical and practical contributions of the publications in Part II, Part I of this dissertation offers a robust definition of innovation in general as well as a more defendable view of the nature of services vs. goods. In addition it clarifies what the term product means in relation to both services and goods as well as in the software industry—a topic that often causes confusion among academics and practitioners