WHY FIRMS ADOPT OPEN SOURCE PLATFORMS: A GROUNDED THEORY OF INNOVATION AND STANDARDS ADOPTION

Jason Dedrick, and Joel West

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 2000)

There is a rich stream of research that studies technology adoption by individuals and organizations (Rogers, 1962; Tornatzky and Fleischer, 1990; Cooper & Zmud, 1990). This research considers factors such as the nature of the technology, the organizational and environmental context in which adoption decisions are made, and the processes by which users adopt and implement new technologies. Research on open source software has focused mainly on the motivations of open source programmers and the organization of open source projects (Kogut & Metiu, 2001; Lerner and Tirole, 2002; Benkler, 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 then place our findings within the contexts of diffusion of innovation and economics of standards theories.