Movement Ideology vs. User Pragmatism in the Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software

The free and open source software (F/OSS) computing movements have argued that F/OSS projects lead to better software, freedom from vendor control, and social benefits by sharing software and its associated source code. While these movement grew out of the interests of programmers to write better software for their own purposes, the open source movement has focused on gaining widespread adoption of F/OSS by businesses and other organizations. This requires acceptance by IT organizations and professionals, whose views of F/OSS have been largely ignored in prior research. We interviewed twenty one IT professionals in fourteen business and public sector organizations to uncover their views on F/OSS and the extent of adoption by their organizations. We find that most users do not value access to source code, and very few have ever modified source code even when they use open source software. Users are much more interested in the low cost of F/OSS, which the movement downplays, and there is no consensus about the relative quality of open source versus closed source software. The main point of agreement is on the importance of control and choice, and the freedom from vendor lockin, that comes with F/OSS. Finally, we find that users are generally agnostic about the ideologies of the F/OSS movement, but that in some cases movement advocates act to encourage adoption within their organizations. Revised as of May 26, 2006