Resources contributing to gaining competitive advantage for open source software projects: An application of resource-based theory

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2013.03.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Management of an OSS project has a decisive role in ensuring the project success.

  • This work investigated the resources affecting the competitiveness of OSS projects.

  • A resource-based view of the firm is used to build the theoretical justifications.

  • Developer interest, user contribution and frequent release are found effective.

  • Project popularity and organizational communication are other effective resources.

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) is an important asset in today's software-intensive society. The success of OSS projects is highly dependent on a number of factors. These factors must be understood and managed as an OSS project progresses. Thus, project management of an OSS project has a decisive role in ensuring the success of its software. The objective of the research is to increase the understanding of the resources affecting the competitiveness of OSS projects. Herewith, the responsiveness of OSS projects to users' needs is assessed via an investigation of the defect-fixing process. A Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV) is used to build theoretical justifications for a set of hypotheses proposed in this study. Data gathered from 427 OSS projects confirmed that developers' interest in and users' contribution to the project as well as frequently updating and releasing the software affect the project's ability to gain competitive advantage through effective defect-fixing. It is also shown that OSS projects that are more popular and have a higher level of organizational communication than others are more likely to gain competitive advantage through effective defect-fixing. Finally, implications of the results for practitioners and the research community are presented.

Introduction

Open source software (OSS) has changed the way that software is developed, deployed, and perceived. The spread of OSS was facilitated by commercial and government organizations, which adopted OSS widely (Carillo and Okoli, 2008). Nowadays, influential organizations of all sizes have adopted OSS products (Sen, 2007a) because OSS has been recognized as a cheap and reliable alternative to proprietary software (Paulson et al., 2004).

However, despite the increasing adoption of open source software, many OSS projects fail in the early stages of development (Aksulu and Wade, 2010, Chengalur-Smith and Sidorova, 2003) for various reasons such as inability to attract volunteer developers to join their development team or inability to attract voluntary contribution from user community (Subramaniam et al., 2009). Whereas Linux and Apache have been highly successful instances of OSS (Nelson et al., 2006, Sen, 2007b), the majority of OSS projects fail (Colazo and Fang, 2009) because of low responsiveness to user needs (Golden, 2004). According to Krishnamurthy (2002), 63% of OSS projects on Sourceforge.net, the world's largest OSS host, fail. This might be because a large majority of OSS projects cannot attract the interest of the user community (Stewart and Gosain, 2006a) for a number of reasons, such as low responsiveness to user needs (Golden, 2004) (e.g., in terms of fixing software defects).

Herein, the responsiveness of OSS projects to user needs is studied via an examination of the defect-fixing process. Previous research on OSS projects has suggested that effective defect-fixing is important for the success of OSS projects (Crowston et al., 2003, Crowston et al., 2006, Garousi, 2009). Effective defect-fixing is tied to users' perceptions of the quality, value, and project development activity (e.g., number of line of codes) (Midha et al., 2010, Mockus and Weiss, 2008). In light of this, the objective of the study reported herein was to investigate the factors that drive the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process, because defect-fixing may well be a strong source of competitive advantage for OSS projects.

To achieve this objective, we developed and assessed a set of hypotheses regarding the influence of project resources on the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process. Previous studies have proposed a number of factors that might be useful when predicting OSS projects' positive outcomes. For example, certain decisions that project managers have to make before launching the project can influence success. Examples of this include decisions on programming language (Chandrasekar Subramaniam et al., 2009), sponsorship (Stewart et al., 2006), project audience, and project topic (Crowston and Scozzi, 2002). Our study complements this earlier work by focusing on a further factor, project resources, because identifying the project resources that have the potential to affect defect-fixing effectiveness might provide organizations that are interested in adopting OSS products with certain criteria for selecting OSS projects. Herein, defect-fixing effectiveness is defined as the extent to which the OSS project accomplishes to remove the defects existing in the software. On the assumption that a project's resources act as a source of added value for users by influencing the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process, we decided to address the following research question:

RQ: What are OSS project resources that have the potential to affect defect-fixing effectiveness and, therefore, might provide organizations that are interested in adopting OSS products with certain criteria for selecting OSS projects?

The answer to this question has both theoretical and practical implications. In order to answer the research question, we used Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm, according to which, in order to attain competitive advantage, projects need to have strategic resources that are valuable, rare, non-imitable, and non-substitutable (Jugdev et al., 2007).

Our study contributes to the existing literature by: (1) extracting the critical resources of OSS projects which are important for their defect-fixing process; (2) revealing the significant impact that the identified OSS projects' resources have on the effectiveness of their defect-fixing process; (3) applying the resource-based view of the firm to the context of OSS projects; and (4) studying a considerable number of OSS projects.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, the research background is discussed. The research model and theoretical justifications for the relationships proposed are presented in Section 3. In Section 4, the design of the study is described. In Section 5, the data analysis and the results of the study are presented. The implications for both research and practice are derived and discussed in Section 6. In Section 7, the limitations of the study are noted followed by concluding remarks in Section 8.

Section snippets

Research background

OSS projects seem to involve a never-ending process of defect fixing. During the defect-fixing process, defects that are observed in the software are handled and resolved to improve the quality of the software. However, this process should not be characterized as simple maintenance, because the software always evolves to fulfill new user requirements (Ghapanchi and Aurum, 2012). That is why previous research considers continuous defect fixing to be one of the processes that characterize OSS

Resource-based view of the firm

According to the resource-based view, competitive advantage and firm performance are influenced strongly by the firm's resources (Barney and Clark, 2007, Jugdev et al., 2007). Resources that are valuable and scarce, and are able to benefit the firm, can bring a temporary competitive advantage to the firm (Hulland et al., 2007). By protecting its resources against imitation and substitution, the firm can sustain the temporary competitive advantage (Barney and Clark, 2007, Lavie, 2006, Ray et

Study design

The present paper seeks to discover relationships between OSS project outcome in terms of defect-fixing effectiveness and its proposed antecedents (project resources) by careful empirical observations, accurately quantifying the concepts and analyzing the measures. This is consistent with positivist epistemology, where the ultimate purpose is to explain relationships between concepts and objects (Neuman, 2006). Several researchers have attempted to objectively represent concepts such as OSS

Data analysis and result

We selected multiple regression analysis as an appropriate method for data analysis. SPSS (version 17) were used for data analysis. In this research, because our variables were highly left skewed, we normalized them by computing their natural log (Crowston and Scozzi, 2002). All other assumptions required to conduct regression analysis were met.

The model explained 43.4% (R2 = 0.434) of the variance in the measure of defect-fixing effectiveness. As indicated in Fig. 4, all five hypotheses were

Contributions to research and implications for theory

In light of the insights from this research, we would like to raise a number of implications for the research community. Firstly, previous researchers have used project activity, user interest in an OSS, and developer interest as indicators for positive outcomes of OSS projects (Crowston and Scozzi, 2002, Stewart et al., 2006, Subramaniam et al., 2009). Our study adds process effectiveness (i.e. the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process) to the list of indicators for positive outcomes in

Limitations

Sourceforge offers ample accessible data from OSS projects, making it an attractive data set for information system researchers. There are limitations to the use of this information though; for instance the measures do not always match perfectly the concepts that are used in the hypotheses proposed by researchers (Crowston and Scozzi, 2002). However, instead of capturing people's perceptions of the concepts, such data represents real practice, “while this process [using data on Sourceforge to

Conclusions

We have reported on a study of the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process as a source of competitive advantage for OSS projects. Using RBV as a theoretical perspective, we examined the relationships between the project resources required for the defect-fixing process and its effectiveness in an OSS environment. An analysis of data collected from 427 OSS projects confirmed that attracting a higher level of developer interest in and user contribution to the defect-fixing process has a

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