Lost and gained in translation: Adoption of open source software development at Hewlett-Packard

Abstract

What happens when an organization form that has emerged in one context is brought into a different context? In this paper, a longitudinal field study approach is used to explore how Hewlett-Packard (HP) molded open source software development (OSSD) into a proprietary software development approach called "Progressive Open Source" (POS). With the help of actornetwork theory, we understand this as a process of translation and find that some central characteristics of OSSD where lost in the translation into POS while other characteristics were gained. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.