An exploratory study into open source platform adoption

Research on open source software has focused mainly on the motivations of open source programmers and the organization of open source projects (Kogut and Metiu, 2001 and Lerner and Tirole, 2002). Some researchers portray open source as an extension of the earlier open systems movement (West and Dedrick, 2001). While there has been some research on open-systems software adoption by corporate MIS organizations (Chau and Tam, 1997) the issue of open source adoption has received little attention. We use a series of interviews with MIS managers to develop a grounded theory of open source platform adoption. We contrast this to prior academic and popular reports about the adoption of open source.