The Influence of Risk Factors in Decision-Making Process for Open Source Software Adoption

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” was a widely used cliché in the 1970s in the corporate IT (information technology) world. Since then, the traditional process of purchasing software has dramatically changed, challenged by the advent of open source software (OSS). Since its inception in the 1980s, OSS has matured, grown, and become one of the important driving forces of the enterprise ecosystem. However, it has also brought important IT security risks that are impacting the OSS IT adoption decision-making process. The recent Heartbleed bug demonstrated the grandeur of the issue. While much of the noise relates to the amplification of perceived risks by the popular mass media coverage, the effect is that many enterprises, mainly for risk reasons, have still chosen not to adopt OSS. We investigated “how do information security related characteristics of OSS affect the risk perception and adoption decision of OSS” by conducting an online survey of 188 IT decision-makers. The proposed Open Source Risk Adoption Model offers novel insights on the importance of the perceived risk antecedents. Our research brings new theoretical contributions, such as understanding the perceived IT security risk relationship with adoption intention in the OSS context, for researchers and important insights for IT information professionals. We have found that IT security risk has a significant role in OSS adoption intention. Our results offer possible future research directions and extend existing theoretical understanding of OSS adoption.