Open Source Reuse and Strategic Imperatives - Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse - page 200

environment, and firms are increasingly collaborating with other firms to co-
create IT enabled products and services. It can be assumed that FOSS with its
high-interoperability can lend itself well to the co-creation of value across busi-
ness units and organizations. Studying the role of FOSS in co-creating value
could be another area of future research.
As a limitation, we cannot claim the generalizability of our study. Our study pro-
vides strong indications of firms gaining strategic advantages through the reuse of
FOSS. However, our study does not include firms that have leveraged proprietary
software for strategic benefits, nor have we eliminated the possibility of firms hav-
ing suffered strategic disadvantages through the use of FOSS. The only claim that
we would like to put forward is that firms operating in a hypercompetitive environ-
ment can potentially gain strategic advantage through the reuse of FOSS. Also, as
mentioned earlier, our approach of using a base category of the variables to guide
the interviews could possibly lead to some dimensions being missed. While we have
made specific attempts to be open-ended and probed for all possible dimensions, we
do acknowledge the possibility of missing additional attributes of FOSS that could
provide firms with strategic advantage.
It should also be noted that the extent of reuse of FOSS is moderated by the type
of license under which the open source software is released. Permissive licenses
such as the BSD license allow reuse of code for any purpose whereas restrictive
licenses such as the GPL allow reuse only for projects that will be further released
under a GPL license [ 15 ]. In this chapter, we do not delve on the licensing issues
of FOSS, but do want to caution the readers on the implications of the type of open
source license on software reuse.
Acknowledgements This research was supported in part by a grant from the Centre for Soft-
ware and IT Management at IIM Bangalore. The authors acknowledge the assistance provided by
Supriya Dey and Uma Bharath in data collection, coding and analysis.
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