Opensourcing

In this chapter we discuss and illustrate opensourcing with case studies at IONA Technologies, Philips Healthcare and Telefonica. The chapter draws on the study reported by Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald (2008) and uses the set of company and community cues derived in that study (in the original publication, these were referred to as obligations). In the study, we asked both company and community interviewees to discuss their perceptions of their own obligations, and also the obligations they would expect from each other. It quickly emerged that many of these obligations were symmetrical; Table 2.1 presents a summary. The study represents an important step towards both (a) elaborating the software sourcing research agenda to incorporate also this novel and unconventional approach to global sourcing and co-opetition, and (b) bringing the under-explored area of company-led open source projects onto the open source research agenda, in particular the liberation of hitherto proprietary software. As noted above, most research on outsourcing has adopted a single perspective: the customer or the supplier (but most often focusing on the customer), while this study considered both the customer (in this case, the company) and the community obligations. This is important since although the cues are symmetrical to a large extent, they are also complementary, and there are differing emphases from each perspective, both sides of which must be fulfilled to achieve a successful opensourcing arrangement. The study also identifies the significant ways in which opensourcing differs from conventional outsourcing—the lack of a formal contract and requirements specification driven by the customer as well as the absence of payment in the conventional sense, for example.