Coopetition of software firms in Open source software ecosystems

Software firms participate in an ecosystem as a part of their innovation strategy to extend value creation beyond the firms boundary. Participation in an open and independent environment also implies the competition among firms with similar business models and targeted markets. Hence, firms need to consider potential opportunities and challenges upfront. This study explores how software firms interact with others in OSS ecosystems from a coopetition perspective. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three OSS projects. Finding shows that software firms emphasize the co-creation of common value and partly react to the potential competitiveness on OSS ecosystems. Six themes about coopetition were identified, including spanning gatekeepers, securing communication, open-core sourcing and filtering shared code. Our work contributes to software engineering research with a rich description of coopetition in OSS ecosystems. Moreover, we also come up with several implications for software firms in pursing a harmony participation in OSS ecosystems.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-69191-6_10, Coopetition of software firms in Open source software ecosystems, 8th ICSOB 2017, Essen, Germany (2017

An Empirical Study of the Landscape of Open Source Projects in Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent

Open source software has drawn more and more attention from researchers, developers and companies nowadays. Meanwhile, many Chinese technology companies are embracing open source and choosing to open source their projects. Nevertheless, most previous studies are concentrated on international companies such as Microsoft or Google, while the practical values of open source projects of Chinese technology companies remain unclear. To address this issue, we conduct a mixed-method study to investigate the landscape of projects open sourced by three large Chinese technology companies, namely Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). We study the categories and characteristics of open source projects, the developer's perceptions towards open sourcing effort for these companies, and the internationalization effort of their open source projects. We collected 1,000 open source projects that were open sourced by BAT in GitHub and performed an online survey that received 101 responses from developers of these projects. Some key findings include: 1) BAT prefer to open source frontend development projects, 2) 88\% of the respondents are positive towards open sourcing software projects in their respective companies, 3) 64\% of the respondents reveal that the most common motivations for BAT to open source their projects are the desire to gain fame, expand their influence and gain recruitment advantage, 4) respondents believe that the most common internationalization effort is "providing an English version of readme files", 5) projects with more internationalization effort (i.e., include an English readme file) are more popular. Our findings provide directions for software engineering researchers and provide practical suggestions to software developers and Chinese technology companies

Is Open Source about innovation? How interactions with the Open Source community impact on the innovative performances of entrepreneurial ventures

Practitioners generally assert that collaboration with the Open Source software (OSS) community enables young software firms to achieve superior innovation performance. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, scholars have never extensively speculated about this assertion or rigorously tested it. In this paper, we attempt to do so. First, we root on the entrepreneurship literature and on the OSS research stream to discuss and empirically investigate whether entrepreneurial ventures collaborating with the OSS community (OSS EVs) achieve innovation performance superior to that of their non-collaborating peers. Then, we refer to the concept of absorptive capacity to determine which factors make OSS EVs better able to leverage their collaboration with the OSS community for innovation purposes. Our econometric estimates use a sample of 230 firms and indicate that OSS EVs collaborating with the OSS community achieve superior innovation. At the same time, the impact of community collaborations on innovation is stronger for EVs that are endowed with more skilled human capital, have experience with firm- OSS community collaboration, and actively contribute to the community.Entrepreneurial ventures, Open Source, firm-community collaboration, innovation performance

SCALED APPROACH TO OPEN SOURCING DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY PRODUCED SOFTWARE

The Department of Defense (DoD) must continue to develop, sustain, and update its software-based capabilities. For the Department of the Navy (DoN), the life cycle costs of software continue to grow; over time, developing code will not be cost effective. An alternative to developing code is to further integrate open source software (OSS) into DoN programs. OSS is software that grants users the ability to view, use, and change the software source code. The use of OSS has been extensively researched, as addressed in the MITRE Corporation’s study on free and open source software (FOSS) in the DoD, completed in 2003. Despite favorable reports and published DoD policy, and the widespread successful use of OSS in current software, program managers are reluctant to fully integrate OSS into the DoN due to concerns with legal requirements, cybersecurity, total expenses, and the ability to implement and control OSS on classified systems while adhering to security regulations. This study utilized a quantitative, scaled approach to determine the risks and benefits to open sourcing for all DoN software. Several OSS case studies were examined. This research concluded that while OSS has been tested and proven cost-effective in certain areas of the DoN, it may not be the most efficient solution for all DoN projects. Therefore, the DoN should consider further implementation of OSS in security, software development, infrastructure support, and for program lifecycle cost reductions.DoN Secretariat Historianhttp://archive.org/details/scaledapproachto1094560404Captain, United States Marine CorpsCaptain, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Industry Best Practices for Corporate Open Sourcing

Companies usually don’t share the source code for the software they develop. While this approach is justified in software that constitutes differentiating intellectual property, proprietary development can lead to redundant development and other opportunity costs. In response, companies are increasingly open sourcing some if not all of their non-differentiating software. Given the limited academic research on this emerging topic, we bridge the gap between industry and academia by taking a practice-based approach. We investigate why and how companies engage in corporate open sourcing. We take an exploratory case study approach. Our cases are four companies with multibillion-dollar revenues each: A major e-commerce company based in Germany; a leading social networking service company based in the USA; a cloud computing software company based in the USA; and a manufacturing and media software company based in the USA. We present the resulting theory in an actionable format of state-of-the-art best practice patterns

Crowdsourcing, Open-sourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing Software Development: A Comparative Analysis

The software development industry invariably embraces different models and techniques to develop the best user-oriented and cost-effective solutions. The selection of an appropriate software-sourcing model is one of the key factors that influences the entire development process. The various software-sourcing models Crowdsourcing, Open-sourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing have been adopted to achieve the best software products. Every software-sourcing model possesses several strengths and may be effective in certain types of projects; however, its limitations may restrain the use of it in some other projects. It is very essential for an organisation to investigate the pros and cons of a potential sourcing-model before going to adopt it for their project. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Crowdsourcing, Open-sourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing models in order to find out the best fit environment and suitability of each model

The adoption of open sources within higher education in Europe : a dissemination case study

For some time now, the open-source (OS) phenomenon has been making its presence felt; disrupting the economics of the software industry and, by proxy, the business of education. A combination of the financial pressure Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) find themselves under and the increasing focus on the use of technology to enhance students' learning have encouraged many HEIs to look towards alternative approaches to teaching and learning. Meanwhile, the "OS" has challenged assumptions about how intellectual products are created and protected and has greatly increased the quantity and arguably the quality of educational technologies available to HEIs

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

Entrepreneurship in an Established Company

There are some fundamental differences between how you go about being innovative in a startup and how you go about it when you have more than 350 customers in 75 countries already running their business on your product. Put another way, you have to approach entrepreneurship differently when you have over 2,000 active deployments serving 40 million people every day. We faced that challenge at Movius Interactive Corporation. This article provides a description of how we took on the challenge of revitalizing innovation and entrepreneurship and how open source plays a part