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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Qualitative Study: How Does the Involvement of Firms in OSS Matter in the Pre-acquisition Phase?

Author : Michael Vetter

Published in: Acquisitions and Open Source Software Development

Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

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Abstract

OSS development on public platforms has many characteristics that differ from traditional innovation processes. Most distinguishable, the development takes place “in the open,” which usually involves a community of contributors who voluntarily contribute to the development process, and the software is often available for free under the terms of an OSS license.

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previous chapter Background: OSS Development and Acquisitions
next chapter Quantitative Study: The Role of OSS for Likelihood and Timing of Acquisitions
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
I am grateful to Crunchbase for kindly providing an API key for their database and granting me the right, under the terms of an academic license, to publish aggregate information based on their data.
 
3
I conducted all interviews myself, for some I was joined by Prof. Joachim Henkel or either Katharina Beck or Johannes Huber, two master students of mine. I gratefully acknowledge their help in contacting interview candidates and transcribing the interviews they have joined and which they used for their own theses focusing on the role of individuals in acquisitions related to OSS development.
 
4
See Lerner and Tirole (2002) or Spaeth et al. (2015) for how firms can present themselves as an attractive employer by letting their employees contribute to OSS during working hours.
 
5
I did not find specific patterns regarding firm size of the target or acquirer by the number of employees. I did also not find specific differences in acquisition motives regarding geographic regions, yet, this finding has to be understood with the caveat in mind that many acquisitions in my sample took place in the US.
 
6
The level of OSS activity needs to be understood on a relative scale: Large corporations with very little activity are considered a “non-OSS-active” firm as they are inherently not OSS oriented (for example almost all firms with more than 100.000 employees have someone in their organization contributing on GitHub, but that doesn’t make almost any of them an OSS oriented firms).
 
7
Stars are considered an indicator for project popularity in GitHub and have previously been used in computer science research (e.g., Papamichail, Diamantopoulos, and Symeonidis, 2016). Sanatinia and Noubir (2016) describe them as the “equivalent of a ‘like’ in social platforms such as Facebook.” According to Borges and Valente (2018), GitHub stars function mainly as a tool for GitHub users to bookmark projects they use, bookmark projects they find interesting, and to show appreciation to the creators of the project.
 
Metadata
Title
Qualitative Study: How Does the Involvement of Firms in OSS Matter in the Pre-acquisition Phase?
Author
Michael Vetter
Copyright Year
2021
Book
Acquisitions and Open Source Software Development

Print ISBN: 978-3-658-35083-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-658-35084-0

Copyright Year: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35084-0_3

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