Cooperation among competitors in the open-source arena: The case of OpenStack
: José Teixeira, Salman Mian, Ulla Hytti
: International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
Publisher: Association for Information Systems
: 2016
: International conference on information systems
: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2016
: 2016 International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2016
: 1026-1079
: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2891652
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.