ACADEMIC ARTICLE SUMMARY
IT Vendor Motivations by Open Source Software Clusters
Article Source: Harvard Business School Working Paper Series No. 00-123, 2006
Publication Date:
Time to Read: 1 minute readWritten By:
Marco IansitiTAP Scholar
Gregory L. Richards
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ARTICLE SUMMARY
Summary:
This paper looks at the interests of contributors to open source software contributors.
POLICY RELEVANCE
Policy Relevance:
Open source software participation seems motivated by factors that drive economic actors generally, including commercial profit.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Key Takeaways:
- Open source software lets users change the code to suit their own needs; open source code under the General Public License (GPL) must be distributed free.
- Contributors to open source projects include corporations who sell information technology, such as IBM, as well as voluntary contributors who work without pay.
- Corporate information technology vendors invest over $10 million per project in undertakings relating to their core business that increase core business revenues.
- Information technology vendors tend to ignore less-financed projects driven by the voluntary efforts of developers such as their employees.
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About Marco Iansiti
Marco Iansiti is the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration, and he is a co-director of the Laboratory for Information Science at Harvard and of the Digital Initiative at HBS. Professor Iansiti’s research examines the digital transformation of companies and industries, with a special focus on digital ecosystems, AI-centric operating models, and the impact of AI and network effects on strategy and business models.
