Cooperation Among Competitors in the Open-Source Arena: The Case of Openstack
As accepted for presentation at the 2016 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2016), held in Dublin, Ireland, December 11-14, 2016. “IS in Organizations and Society” track.
38 Pages Posted: 30 Dec 2016
Date Written: September 23, 2016
Abstract
Interorganizational interactions are often complex and paradoxical. In this research, we transcend two management paradoxes: competition versus cooperation and open-source versus proprietary technology development. We follow the OpenStack open-source ecosystem where competing firms cooperate in the joint-development of a cloud infrastructure for big data. We provide a narrative, complemented with social network visualizations, which depicts the evolution of cooperation and competition. Our findings suggest that development transparency and weak intellectual property rights (i.e., characteristics of open-source ecosystems) allow a focal firm to transfer information and resources more easily between multiple alliances.
Keywords: alliances, business ecosystems, coopetition, open-coopetition, open-source
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