Aligning business goals and risks in OSS adoption

Abstract

Increasing adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) requires a change in the organizational culture and reshaping IT decision-makers mindset. Adopting OSS software components introduces some risks that can affect the adopter organization’s business goals, therefore they need to be considered. To assess these risks, it is required to understand the socio-technical structures that interrelate the stakeholders in the OSS ecosystem, and how these structures may propagate the potential risks to them. In this paper, we study the connection between OSS adoption risks and OSS adopter organizations’ business goals. We propose a model-based approach and analysis framework that combines two existing frameworks: the i* framework to model and reason about business goals, and the RiskML notation to represent and analyse OSS adoption risks. We illustrate our approach with data drawn from an industrial partner organization in a joint EU project.