Company Involvement with Open Source Communities: Establishing the Worth of a Community
Maha Shaikh, Tony Cornford · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2013
In this paper we show that historically companies that adopt and invest in open source have found it difficult to make sense of what to expect from an open source community in regards to quality of software, sustainability of the product, upgrades and other such characteristics that set open source slightly apart from traditional development. Such ambiguity is seen by companies as a form of uncertainty that needs to be managed and made less problematic. In other words, managers interested in bringing open source into the company need to show how the uncertainties of open source can be converted into risks (something that has a probability and thus can be measurable and understandable). We conducted in-depth interviews of employees at various levels of two global technology companies that have been involved with open source for over a decade. Drawing upon Boltanski and Thevenot’s (2006) concepts of orders of worth we show how companies convert uncertainties to risks in relation to an open source community by a) evaluating what are desirable characteristics (qualifiers) in open source communities, b) forcing the qualifiers to become more understandable by moulding them closer to characteristics sought in traditional software companies, and c) how this moulding takes a more material turn. This paper shows how companies make sense of open-sourcing and re-fashion what is offered in relation to what they are familiar with – and they do so through making each open source community qualifier more material and less abstract.