Bringing Open Source Software to the Desktop: an In-depth Study of the Implementation and Use of Staroffice

Introduction Open Source software (OSS) is coming to the attention of individuals, organisations, and governments' worldwide, and is increasingly being adopted by firms for specific business purposes (Overby, Bharadwaj et al. 2004). Organisations such as Beaumont Hospital Dublin have claimed cost savings in excess of €8m over 5 years as a result of migrating to OSS desktop systems (Fitzgerald and Kenny 2003). However, the uptake of end-user desktop OSS applications to date has been modest, and Microsoft products remain the de-facto standard on the corporate desktop (BusinessWeek Online, January 2005 1). This brings into sharp focus the most challenging question faced by the Open Source community today. If organisations value low acquisition costs, low total cost of ownership of software, potentially plentiful support, free access to source code, and the wish to avoid proprietary software vendor lock-in, why have more organisations not adopted OSS? There is currently much interest amongst researchers in the area of OSS. However there is currently little research on the adoption and use of OSS at the desktop level. This paper attempts to contribute to the existing research by reporting on an in-depth, interpretive, processual study of an attempt by a large Irish Trade Union (referred to in this paper as " Irish Union ") to replace Microsoft Office with an Open Source alternative, StarOffice. The migration to StarOffice was problematic and less successful than hoped, and it became clear during the research that there existed within Irish Union almost universal opposition to StarOffice. This raises an interesting question. If cost savings of the magnitude of those in Beaumont Hospital can be achieved by migrating to OSS, and if the claims of the Open Source community that OSS is more stable, secure and customisable than its proprietary counterpart are to be believed, why did Irish Union reject StarOffice in favour of a return to Microsoft Office? This paper describes how StarOffice was implemented and used in Irish Union, and examines why the initiative ultimately failed. The main objective of this paper is to attempt an understanding of OSS adoption on the desktop. We attempt to make sense of why the StarOffice initiative within Irish Union failed, and examine the difficulties associated with OSS implementation on a broader scale. We also explore the social and political dynamics of Irish Union's migration to StarOffice in an effort to discover if different social and political stances taken by relevant …