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Chapter 10
Open Source Reuse and Strategic Imperatives
Rahul De' and Ravi A. Rao
Abstract
Free and Open Source software (FOSS) allows firms to gain strategic
advantage by enabling business agility that is essential to compete in a hypercompet-
itive environment. Literature on the strategic role of IT indicates that contemporary
firms need to constantly upgrade their IT capabilities and maintain flexible IT sys-
tems to remain competitive. We argue that FOSS lends itself well to an iterative pro-
cess of capability development: providing firms with a strategic advantage through
reuse of FOSS. We conduct a qualitative case study-based research of commercial
firms to assess the strategic imperatives of reusing FOSS. Results indicate that the
primary motivation for reusing FOSS is the ability to innovate through access to
open source components along with their embedded knowledge, supported by inde-
pendence from vendor lock-in. Specific advantages enjoyed by firms through the use
of FOSS include flexibility, interoperability, stability, security and time-to-market.
10.1 Introduction
Software reuse has the potential to provide economic benefits through enhanced
quality and productivity [
20
], as has been shown through research in the software
engineering domain. But does software reuse also provide firms with strategic ben-
efits? Most research related to software reuse for business purposes has focused on
the economic value of the reuse [
7
] and on the strategy around how to reuse software
[
8
]. In this chapter, we explore whether software reuse, specifically the reusable as-
sets of open source, provides firms with strategic benefits.
R. De' (
)
R.A. Rao
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bangalore, India
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