Introduction

In the software market, the recent trend seems to be moving toward the development, use, and adoption of open source software (OSS). Various venture capital (VC) deals and acquisitions of OSS firms by large software vendors document the increasing prevalence of OSS in business (Von Kortzfleisch et al. 2010), such as the acquisition of JBoss by RedHat in April 2006 for approximately $ 350 million, the acquisition of Sleepycat by Oracle in February 2006 or the $ 1 billion acquisition of MySQL by Sun in January 2008. In addition, IBM's investment in Linux (Iansiti & Richards 2006), Google's initiation of the Android platform, which has already reached second place in the mobile operating systems market, or the recently announced alliance between Nokia and Intel for the development of their own OSS operating system for mobile phones named MeGoo show, that even software user firms – and not software vendors only – invest in the OSS development approach.