Managerial and Technical Barriers to the Adoption of Open Source Software

In this paper we focus on managerial and technical decisions for acquisi tion of OSS and discuss potential approaches to a widespread adoption of OSS. Moving from mainly techni cal issues in procurement to corporate IS governance presents OSS with new challenges beyond outlining a business case for a particular OSS application. We draw parallels to the business case for commercial software products (COTS). Compared with COTS, OSS products seem to have several advantages, but based on existing literature and a case study, we develop and discuss the hypothesis that a major barrier may be the “customer's” uncertainty and unfamiliarity with OSS vendor relationships. We find that corporate governance and architecture needs to be accounted for in both COTS and OSS. This paper should be seen as a first step researching the fit between procurement and delivery models for OSS.

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