An empirical investigation into the assimilation of open source server software

Abstract

In recent years, open source software (OSS) has become widely known and adopted in practice. In academic literature, an increasing number of studies on the adoption of OSS have been published to investigate which factors influence its adoption. However, most of these studies have an exploratory nature, and empirical support based on a large-scale quantitative study is still missing. To address this issue, we present the results of a large-scale quantitative study investigating the factors that influence the assimilation of open source server software (OSSS) by organizations. OSSS refers to open source software products such as operating systems, web servers and mail servers. We developed a conceptual model that describes the factors influencing the assimilation of OSSS. We gathered data from 210 Belgian organizations and analyzed it using PLS to test this conceptual model. The proposed model was able to explain a large proportion of the variance in the dependent variable in the model. Surprisingly, we have found no support for the influence of several widely claimed advantages of OSSS. Our findings further show that the assimilation of OSSS is predominantly influenced by the availability of internal and external knowledge of OSSS. © 2011 by the Association for Information Systems.