Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software: Barriers and Remedies

contributed articles

doi: 10.1145/ 1666420.1666457

by del nagy, areej m. yassin, and anol bhattacherjee

organizational adoption of open source software: barriers and remedies

P erh aPs the bus i ne s s c as e fo r ad oP tin g

open source software is an easy sell. After all, the software is free, and can be simply downloaded from the Internet and installed or customized as needed. Organizations interested in reducing the licensing fees of proprietary software, while also avoiding the penalties and legal liabilities associated with their illegal use, can definitely consider open source software a plausible alternative. However, less obvious than the cost savings but equally important are the barriers (“hidden costs”) of adopting open source software. Open source software has created considerable excitement in the business world over the last decade. These applications, designed by groups of volunteer software developers, have the potential to break the current dominance of proprietary software and restrictive licenses for many business applications,

c o mm unicatio ns o f t h e ac m | m a r c h 201 0 | vo l . 5 3 | n o. 3

reduce software development time and improve software quality, and most importantly, bring much needed software applications within the reach of individuals and small businesses, who cannot otherwise afford such software.8 Further, unlike proprietary software, open source software applications make their source code available for free, which can be customized to fit the unique needs of specific organizations. Many organizations have caught on to open source software and realized significant cost savings in technology expenditure as a result. For instance, Cendant Travel Distribution Services replaced a $100 million mainframe system with a $2.5 million system running on 144 Linux servers.6 Amazon.com cut its technology expenditure from $71 million to $54 million by switching to open source applications.9 Sabre Holdings saved tens of...