Working Papers,
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

JEL-codes: H00

13 pages, September 19, 2005

Full text files

6471  

Download statistics

• Copenhagen Business School, Department of Informatics
• Ordering Working Papers
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Lars Nondal ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:hhs:cbsinf:2005_007This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:19:16.