How Firms Can Strategically Influence Open Source Communities
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How Firms Can Strategically Influence Open Source Communities by Viktor Lee Pdf
Firms have discovered that open source (OS) communities can be valuable sources of innovation. However, the access for firms to these communities turned to be intricate. One proven way of how firms can enter OS communities is via their personnel (“men on the inside”). Focusing on firmsponsored OS communities, Viktor Lee detects the specific functions of MOI and how these individuals influence the community network by applying a comparative case study of two OSS firms. A netnographic and social network analysis of the community interactions of over 12,000 individuals was conducted. He concludes that firms can succeed in integrating a community into the firm’s development process with the help of the MOI.
Open Source Innovation by Cornelius Herstatt,Daniel Ehls Pdf
Open Source Innovation (OSI) has gained considerable momentum within the last years. Academic and management practice interest grows as more and more end-users consider and even participate in Open Source product development like Linux, Android, or Wikipedia. Open Source Innovation: Phenomenon, Participant Behaviour, Impact brings together rigorous academic research and business importance in scrutinizing OCI from three perspectives: The Phenomenon, Participants' Behavior, and Business Implications. The first section introduces OCI artefacts, including who is participating and why, and provides a systematic overview of the literature. The second section stresses the behaviour of participants, highlighting participation progression, community selection, user entrepreneurship and fair behaviour, and answering key questions like how to manage governance rules, openness and community design aspects. The third explores the impact and implications of OSI for firms and economies by evaluating business models, uncovering opportunities for firms to interact with communities, and presenting value capture mechanisms. Open Source Innovation provides a full picture of the movement to help readers understand and engage with OSI from the micro perspective of individuals, to the community, to the macro perspective of firms and economies.
A Business Ecology Perspective on Community-Driven Open Source by Markus Radits Pdf
This thesis approaches the phenomenon of open source software (OSS) from a managerial and organisational point of view. In a slightly narrower sense, this thesis studies commercialisation aspects around community-driven open source. The term ‘community-driven’ signifies open source projects that are managed, steered, and controlled by communities of volunteers, as opposed to those that are managed, steered, and controlled by single corporate sponsors. By adopting a business ecology perspective, this thesis places emphasis on the larger context within which the commercialisation of OSS is embedded (e.g., global and collaborative production regimes, ideological foundations, market characteristics, and diffuse boundary conditions). Because many business benefits arise as a consequence of the activities taking place in the communities and ecosystems around open source projects, a business ecology perspective may be a useful analytical guide for understanding the opportunities, challenges, and risks that firms face in commercializing OSS. There are two overarching themes guiding this thesis. The first theme concerns the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. There is a tendency in the literature on business ecosystems and open source to emphasise the benefits, opportunities, and positive aspects of behaviour, at the expense of the challenges that firms face. However, business ecosystems are not only spaces of opportunity, they may also pose a variety of challenges that firms need to overcome in order to be successful. To help rectify this imbalance in the literature, the first theme particularly focuses on the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. The underlying ambition is to facilitate a more balanced and holistic understanding of the collaborative and competitive dynamics in ecosystems around open source projects. The other theme concerns the complex intertwining of community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. As is acknowledged in the literature, the subject of firm-community interaction has become increasingly important because the survival, success, and sustainability of peer production communities has become of strategic relevance to many organisations. However, while many strategic benefits may arise as a consequence of firm-community interaction, there is a lack of research studying how the value-creating logics of firm–community interaction are embedded within the bigger picture in which they occur. Bearing this bigger picture in mind, this thesis explores the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing by focusing on four aspects that are theorised in the literature: reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity. This thesis is designed as a qualitative exploratory single-case study. The empirical case is Joomla, a popular open source content management system. In a nutshell, the Joomla case in this thesis comprises the interactions in the Joomla community and the commercial activities around the Joomla platform (e.g., web development, consulting, marketing, customisation, extensions). In order to achieve greater analytical depth, the business ecology perspective is complemented with ideas and propositions from other theoretical areas, such as stakeholder theory, community governance, organizational identity, motivation theory, pricing, and bundling. The findings show that the common challenges in commercialising community-driven open source revolve around nine distinct factors that roughly cluster into three domains: the ecosystem, the community, and the firm. In short, the domain of the ecosystem comprises the global operating environment, the pace of change, and the cannibalisation of ideas. The domain of the community comprises the platform policy, platform image, and the voluntary nature of the open source project. And finally, the domain of the firm comprises the blurring boundaries between private and professional lives, the difficulty of estimating costs, and firm dependencies. Based on these insights, a framework for analysing community-based value creation in business ecosystems is proposed. This framework integrates collective innovation, community engagement, and value capture into a unified model of value creation in contexts of firm–community interaction. Furthermore, the findings reveal demonstrable effects of reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity in the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. By showing that this intertwining can be strong in empirical cases where commercial activities are often implicitly assumed to be absent, this thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of firm involvement in the realm of open source. Based on the empirical and analytical insights, a number of further theoretical implications are discussed, such as the role of intersubjective trust in relation to the uncertainties that commercial actors face, an alternative way of classifying community types, the metaphor of superorganisms in the context of open source, issues pertaining to the well-being of community participants, and issues in relation to the transitioning of open source developers from a community-based to an entrepreneurial self-identity when commercialising an open source solution. Furthermore, this thesis builds on six sub-studies that make individual contributions of their own. In a broad sense, this thesis contributes to the literature streams on the commercialisation of OSS, the business value and strategic aspects of open source, the interrelationships between community forms of organising and entrepreneurial activities, and the nascent research on ecology perspectives on peer-production communities. A variety of opportunities for future research are highlighted. Denna avhandling undersöker fenomenet öppen källkod, ’open source’, ur ett lednings och styrningsperspektiv. Mer konkret studeras aspekter på kommersialisering av ett community-drivet open source projekt (OSS, open source software). Uttrycket ’community-drivet’ hänvisar till open source projekt som drivs och styrs av volontärgrupper, till skillnad från open source projekt som drivs och styrs av enskilda företag. Genom att tillämpa ett affärsekologiperspektiv fokuserar denna avhandling på det vidare sammanhang som karaktäriserar kommersialisering av OSS, såsom globala och kollaborativa produktionssystem, värderingarna öppenhet och samarbete, marknadsstrukturer, och diffusa organisationsgränser. Aktiviteterna i open source communityn och dess kringliggande ekosystem kan bidra till många fördelar för företag, och därför kan ett affärsekologiperspektiv vara en användbar analytisk lins för att förstå de möjligheter, utmaningar och risker som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar OSS. Två övergripande teman lyfts fram i denna avhandling. Det första temat handlar om de utmaningar som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar community-driven OSS. Det finns i litteraturen om affärsekologier och open source en tendens att betona fördelar, möjligheter och positiva aspekter på beteende på bekostnad av att undersöka utmaningar som företag står inför. Affärsekologier innebär dock inte enbart möjligheter för företag, utan kan också orsaka en rad utmaningar som företag behöver hantera för att lyckas. Med utgångspunkt i denna obalans i litteraturen fokuserar det första temat på de utmaningar med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS. Detta görs för att bidra till en mer balanserad och holistisk förståelse av den på samma gång kollaborativa och konkurrerande dynamiken i affärsekologin runt ett open source projekt. Det andra temat handlar om sammanflätningen (intertwining) mellan community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet. Såsom det framgår i litteraturen har frågan om samverkan mellan företag och communities blivit allt viktigare, eftersom communityernas överlevnad, framgång och hållbarhet har blivit strategiskt viktiga för många organisationer. Även om många strategiska fördelar kan uppstå som en följd av samverkan mellan företag och communities saknas forskning om hur värdeskapande uppstår i en vidare kontext. Med ett bredare perspektiv i åtanke undersöker denna avhandling sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och en vinstdrivande verksamhet genom att fokusera på fyra aspekter av sammanflätning som förekommer i litteraturen: förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Denna avhandling är utformad som en kvalitativ utforskande fallstudie. Det empiriska fallet är Joomla, ett innehållshanteringssystem som bygger på open source. Inom ramen för avhandlingen undersöks fallet i termer av samspel inom Joomla-communityn och de kommersiella aktiviteterna som sker runt Joomla-plattformen (t.ex., webbutveckling, rådgivning, marknadsföring, anpassningar, och extensions). För att uppnå ett analytiskt djup kompletteras affärsekologiperspektivet med idéer och förslag från andra teoretiska områden, såsom intressentmodellen, community-styrning, företagsidentitet, motivationsteori, prissättning, och buntning. Resultaten visar att utmaningarna med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS kretsar kring nio olika faktorer som kan grupperas i tre områden: ekosystemet, communityn, och företaget. Ekosystemsfaktorerna innefattar den globala verksamma miljön, förändringshastigheten och kannibalisering av idéer. Community-faktorerna innefattar plattformspolicy, plattformsimage, och att deltagandet i open source projektet sker på frivillig basis. Slutligen innefattar företagsfaktorerna suddiga gränser mellan privatliv och arbetsliv, svårigheten att uppskatta kostnader samt beroendeförhållanden mellan företag. Baserat på dessa insikter föreslås en modell för att analysera communitybaserad värdeskapande i affärsekologier. Modellen integrerar kollektiv innovation, community-deltagande, och value capture i en holistisk modell för community-baserad värdeskapande i kontexten samverkan mellan företag och communities. Vidare beskrivs effekterna av sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet i termer av förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Genom att visa att sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet kan vara stark i fall där det ofta antas implicit att kommersiella aktiviteter inte förekommer ger denna avhandling en mer nyanserad förståelse av företags roll i kontexten open source. Baserat på empiriska och analytiska insikter diskuterar denna avhandling ett antal teoretiska konsekvenser, såsom rollen som intersubjektiv tillit spelar i förhållande till den ovisshet som kommersiella aktörer står inför, ett alternativt sätt att klassificera community-typer, metaforen superorganismer i kontexten open source, community-deltagares välbefinnande, samt hur open source utvecklare hanterar övergången från en community-baserad självidentitet till en entreprenöriell självidentitet vid kommersialisering av OSS. Dessutom ger de sex delstudier som avhandlingen bygger på egna bidrag som presenteras i respektive delstudie. I stora drag bidrar denna avhandling till litteraturen om kommersialisering av OSS, affärsmässiga och strategiska aspekter på open source, samspelet mellan community-driven entreprenörsverksamhet samt den framväxande forskning som använder ett affärsekologiperspektiv för att studera kollegial produktion baserad på allmännytta. En mängd olika möjligheter för framtida forskning lyfts fram.
Joining Decisions in Open Collaborative Innovation Communities by Daniel Ehls Pdf
Daniel Ehls analyzes the impact of contextual factors on attracting volunteers into open initiatives. He answers challenging questions like why do users join one community over another and what are attractive conditions for user and open innovation With a discrete choice experiment, Daniel Ehls identifies openness trade-offs and joining preferences contingent on access, usage and sponsorship. Also, he reveals causes of taste heterogeneity and shows how context and personality determine joining decisions. Management insights target organizational behavior, e.g. how the governance structure affects user actions, and competitive strategy, e.g. how to source external distributed knowledge.
Specialization in Online Innovation Communities by Jan Bierwald Pdf
Jan Bierwald presents the individual behavior of members in Online Innovation Communities, in which thousands of users contribute voluntarily to a jointly developed outcome. The individual member behavior is explored by conducting a detailed content analysis of more than 7,300 mails. His study shows on which content individual members focus their contributions and how specialized members behave within the community. This leads to various implications for today’s community management to improve the attracting, controlling and retaining of their members.
Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability by Brian Fitzgerald,Audris Mockus,Minghui Zhou Pdf
Free/libre open source software (FLOSS) ecosystems such as Linux have had a tremendous impact on computing and society and have captured the attention of businesses, researchers, and policy makers. Research on FLOSS has been ongoing for almost two decades. From an economic perspective, the most common topics involve motivation and organization. As commercial participation in FLOSS has become common, the question of how to combine FLOSS practice with commercial practice has been the subject of research, particularly with a view to understanding how to ensure sustainability of the ecosystem. This book is based on a Shonan meeting on FLOSS ecosystem sustainability held in June 2017. The meeting brought together a blend of established and young researchers who were actively studying the FLOSS phenomenon. These researchers were drawn from a variety of disciplines including software engineering, human computer interaction, information systems, computer-supported cooperative work, data mining, cognitive science, psychology, operations research, and management. Industry practitioners who were active in the FLOSS space also participated. This book presents the results of discussion on fundamental questions related to the impact and sustainability of FLOSS ecosystems, including: · How does an ecosystem form? How do different stakeholders work together to form a community that develops and maintains valuable and freely available software, and how does an ecosystem with millions of repositories and developers operate given the lack of centralized planning? · How does an ecosystem evolve in response to the environment as technology and needs evolve over time? · How do newcomers learn the protocols and practices of an ecosystem? How would they sustain the ecosystem? What is the relationship between people and ecosystem sustainability?
Open Source Systems: Towards Robust Practices by Federico Balaguer,Roberto Di Cosmo,Alejandra Garrido,Fabio Kon,Gregorio Robles,Stefano Zacchiroli Pdf
This book is open access under a CC BY license. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2017, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in May 2017. The 16 revised full papers and 3 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS), including: licensing, strategies, and practices; case studies; projects, communication, and participation; tools; and project management, development and evaluation.
Acquisitions and Open Source Software Development by Michael Vetter Pdf
Participation of firms in Open Source Software (OSS) development is steadily increasing. In fact, a substantial part of OSS projects today are developed in informal collaboration between firms and a community of voluntary contributors. As more and more firms are active in OSS, acquisitions of firms active in OSS development occur increasingly often. Yet, despite the economic and practical importance of OSS, research has so far overlooked this phenomenon. This dissertation explores this phenomenon of acquisitions of firms active in OSS development. Michael Vetter examines the role of OSS in the pre-acquisition phase and the impact of acquisitions on OSS development in the post-acquisition phase. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, the author examines acquisition motives, acquisition likelihood, timing of acquisitions, and outcomes of acquisitions and discuss mechanisms behind variations across acquisitions.The findings from the studies contribute to research on acquisitions and OSS development while also providing insights into how to leverage OSS in target search, selection and evaluation processes as well as how to effectively manage acquisitions of firms active in OSS and the communities around them.
Theorizing the Sharing Economy by Indre Maurer,Johanna Mair,Achim Oberg Pdf
This volume takes advantage of this opportunity by presenting a collection of empirical and conceptual work that explores the variety and the trajectories of new forms of organizing in the sharing economy, and in doing so builds on, rejuvenates, and refines existing organization theories.
Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman,Richard P. Gabriel Pdf
It's a plain fact: regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. Open source offers the possibility of bringing more innovation into your business by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the business. The key is developing a web-driven community where new types of collaboration and creativity can flourish. Since 1998 Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel have been helping groups at Sun Microsystems understand open source and advising them on how to build successful communities around open source projects. In this book the authors present lessons learned from their own experiences with open source, as well as those from other well-known projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla. * Winner of 2006 Jolt Productivity Award for General Books * Describes how open source development works and offers persuasive reasons for using it to help achieve business goals. * Shows how to use open source in day-to-day work, discusses the various licenses in use, and describes what makes for a successful project. * Written in an engaging style for executives, managers, and engineers that addresses the human and business issues involved in open source development as well as its history, philosophy, and future
Online Communities and Open Innovation by Linus Dahlander,Lars Frederiksen,Francesco Rullani Pdf
The advent of Internet marked a significant change in how users and customers can be involved in the innovative process. History is rife with examples of how users innovate, but Internet and its associated communication technologies brought radically new means for individuals to interact rapidly and at little cost in communities that spur new innovations. These communities are initiated and governed by people that differ in their motivations for taking part and participate to varying degrees. Such communities are outside the immediate control of companies seeking to develop open innovation strategies aimed at harnessing their work. This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organization theory, innovation studies and marketing in order to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers to an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional wisdoms for how business can be done. This book was published as a special issue of Industry and Innovation.
Information Systems: People, Organizations, Institutions, and Technologies by Alessandro D'Atri,Domenico Saccà Pdf
The ItAIS (http://www.itais.org) is the Italian chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS: http://www.aisnet.org) which brings together both individual and institutional members. The Italian chapter has been established in 2003, and since then, it has promoted the exchange of ideas, experiences and knowledge among academics and professionals in Italy, devoted to the development, management, organization and use of Information Systems. The contents of this book are based on a selection of the best papers presented at the Annual Conference of the ItAIS, that has been held in Paris, in December 2008. The book adopts an interdisciplinary approach, recognizing the need to harness a number of different disciplines in both the theory and the practice of information systems. The work here presented is comprehensive and up-to-date in this subject. The contributions to this volume aim to disseminate academic knowledge and might be particularly relevant to practitioners in the field.
As we continue in an era of simultaneous innovation and commoditization, enabled by digital technologies, managers around the world are asking themselves "how can we both adapt to rapid changes in technology and markets, and still make enough money to survive - and thrive?" To provide answers to these important and urgent questions, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Michael Cusumano draws on nearly 30 years of research into the practices of global corporations that have been acknowledged leaders and benchmark setters - including Apple, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Toyota, Sony, Panasonic, and others in a range of high-technology, services, and manufacturing industries. These companies have also encountered major challenges in their businesses or disruptions to their core technologies. If we look deeply enough, he contends, we can see the ideas that underpin the management practices that make for great companies, and drive their strategic evolution and innovation capabilities. From his deep knowledge of these organizations, Cusumano distils six enduring principles that he believes have been - in various combinations - crucial to their strategy, innovation management practices, and ability to deal with change and uncertainty. The first two principles - platforms (not just products), and services (especially for product firms) - are relatively new and broader ways of thinking about strategy and business models, based on Cusumano's latest research. The other four - capabilities (not just strategy or positioning), the "pull" concept (not just push), economies of scope (not just scale), and flexibility (not just efficiency) - all contribute to agility, which is a mix of flexibility and speed. Many practices associated with these ideas, such as dynamic capabilities, just-in-time production, iterative or prototype-driven product development, flexible design and manufacturing, modular architectures, and component reuse, are now commonly regarded as standard best practices. These six enduring principles are essential in a new world dominated by platforms and technology-enabled services.
Open Source Ecosystems: Diverse Communities Interacting by Cornelia Boldyreff,Kevin Crowston,Björn Lundell,Anthony I. Wasserman Pdf
Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.