Open Source Business Models Research Articles

Open source business models: ready for prime time

Open source software was ready for any enterprise by putting its full corporate support behind Linux, the open source ecosystem has matured into a shoulder-to-shoulder companion for commercial proprietary software. A new tapestry of community resources, venture capital, and informal networks of open source veterans championing new applications is being woven through industries and academia. What open source software really does is open up the low end of the market, and it certainly changes dynamics on the global stage.

Intrinsic Motivations and Profit-Oriented Firms in Open Source Software: Do Firms Practise What They Preach?

A growing body of economic literature is exploring the incentives of the agents involved in the Open Source movement. However, most empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (Open Source firms). This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of firms that engage in Open Source activities. Data on firms' motivations were collected by a large-scale survey conducted on 146 Italian companies supplying Open Source (OS) solutions and show that intrinsic, community-based incentives do play a role. Nevertheless, these positive attitudes towards the values of the OS community, which are quite surprising by profit-oriented firms, are not in general put into practise. Discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours is a widely investigated phenomenon in social psychology literature. We explore its pattern in our sample, find that it does not concern all the respondents, and single out a group of firms adopting a more consistent behaviour. Our results are in line with the literature on individual motivations in organisations and Open Source business models.

Freesourcing - A Competitive Advantage in Information Era

We quite often hear this There's no money in bits and bytes anymore and software is moving away from the licensed model to the leased and subscriptions approach where the money will be in Web service contracts. This will suit the open source business model (Freesourcing Business Model) down to the ground, or Companies are increasingly looking for better ways to manage their IT infrastructure and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). So lets try and understand what it really means to the corporates. We will see how Freesourcing can be a competitive advantage? Utilizing 'scenario planning', we will try to analyze what Freesourcing is and how beneficial it can be finally in the cost saving efforts of a company; how, in today's information dominant scenarios it can lead to the tangible increase in stakeholders value and How companies can share this cost reduction with their end customers, giving them 'delight proposition'.