Open Source Software Acquisition

Holck,, Jesper, Mogens Kühn Pedersen and Michael Holm Larsen
Additional contact information
Holck,, Jesper: Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Postal: Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60 , DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Mogens Kühn Pedersen: Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Postal: Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60 , DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Michael Holm Larsen: Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Postal: Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60 , DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

No 2005-7, Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Informatics

Abstract: Lately we have seen a growing interest from both public and private organisations to adopt Open Source Software (OSS), not only for a few, specific applications but also on a more general level throughout the organisation. As a consequence, the organisations’ decisions on adoption of OSS are becoming increasingly more important and complex. We present three perspectives organisations can employ in their decisions: seeing OSS acquisition as a business case, as COTS acquisition, and as architectural change within a governance framework. We present case studies of decisions on OSS adoption, and categorise the decision criteria we have found. Our results indicate that for large-scale adoption of OSS, focus will be on architectural considerations: enterprise-wide architectures will at first be a barrier, but in the long term OSS’s support of open standards can be a major enabler for OSS adoption. In contrast, in smaller organisations and in small-scale adoption of OSS, the cheap price of OSS is a major enabler, as it provides a good opportunity for experiments and short-term economic benefits. For small organisations these experiments can lead to development of a common IT-architecture, and in larger organisations OSS can be adopted in niche-areas, without significantly violating an existing IT-architecture.

Keywords: open source; COTS; IT architecture; governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2005-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-knm and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://openarchive.cbs.dk/cbsweb/handle/10398/6471 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:cbsinf:2005_007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Informatics Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lars Nondal ().