Analyzing Open Source Business with Porter’s Five Forces

Abstract

Today many IT companies (in both commercial and non-profit sectors) use Open Source as their main infrastructure, and as consequence they face to some social, cultural and financial aspects of OS. Now a day, the use of open source software in IT businesses, and in the IT market is going to become popular and accepted. In this paper we try to make a strategic analysis of OS business model by using the Porter’s five forces framework. We study many case studies and previous researches for this analysis and recognize that the issue of license and revenue model has to be precisely considered while a firm adopts the open source strategy