There are many aspects of organizational adoptability that attract user-firms to FOSS. The most obvious is initial cost—an entire stack of software applications can be assembled without paying licensing fees. User-firms may also adopt FOSS to avoid lock-in and excessive dependence on a commercial vendor.
Google has developed a customized version of the Linux operating system that permits it to use a cluster of thousands of inexpensive computers to power its search service Batelle, Modifications of existing products by lead-users can be a valuable source of innovation and product improvement von Hippel, Innovations developed by lead-users typically have a high potential for market success for two reasons Franke et al. Lead-user development has traditionally functioned well in FOSS due to the relationship between the users and the software the use.
Much of the source code for system-oriented software such as Linux utilities, Sendmail, and Perl has been contributed by individuals who have been motivated to improve the software in order to make their primary jobs easier Weber, Moreover, the provision of an innovation toolkit a critical enabler of lead-user development is implicit in the norms and collaboration infrastructure provided by FOSS projects.
This toolkit is generally accessible to users of systems-oriented software because they typically possess the specialized knowledge and skills needed to implement their own solutions to software problems. FOSS licenses and the established culture of the FOSS community encourage users to contribute their solutions back to the project, thereby ensuring that the software improves as its adoption increases.
The problem that arises in the context of enterprise applications is that the conditions that foster lead-user improvement of systems-oriented FOSS seem much less likely to occur.
First, individual users of enterprise business software tend not to be software experts and operate instead within a non-technical business environment. The innovation toolkit implicit in the open source model is thus inaccessible to most users of enterprise business software. Second, firms are normally motivated to discourage any valuable internal innovation from permeating the boundaries of the firm Liebeskind, We argue, however, that firms have both the means and the motivation to act as lead-users in the development of enterprise FOSS.
A fundamental reason that firms exist is to enable the division of labor and foster specialization. Accordingly, a lead-user need not be a single person—firms can and do hire experienced FOSS developers to implement the functionality desired by business users. The question is thus not whether a firm can participate in the improvement of enterprise FOSS, but rather why a firm would be willing to forego the advantages of proprietary control over its enhancements.
We hypothesize two reasons, both which are unrelated to altruism or the culture of reciprocity in the open source community. Firms typically adopt packaged enterprise applications whether commercial or open source to implement important but non-strategic functionality Hitt and Brynjolfsson, Firms that recognize that incremental customization of enterprise software is unlikely to confer sustainable competitive advantage are unlikely to view enforcement of their property rights for their modifications as a high priority.
Second, firms create a significant maintenance liability whenever they customize packaged software Beatty and Williams, The benefits of remaining compatible with future releases the software thereby outweigh the risks of passing a strategically valuable innovation to competitors. The overtly economic incentives for lead-user development of FOSS at the firm level are clearly different from the subtle, individual-level incentives commonly acknowledged to drive successful FOSS projects.
However, from the perspective of our analysis, the existence of the incentives is more important than their root cause. The fact that firms are often motivated to use and contribute to the development of certain types of FOSS applications specifically those that provide important but non-strategic functionality enables the comparisons in the following sections between well-known systems-oriented FOSS projects and emerging business-oriented enterprise FOSS projects.
The niche typically consists of consumers who desire products that are simpler, cheaper, and more convenient Christensen, The lack of up-front licensing fees makes FOSS attractive to this niche, at least on the dimension of short-term cost.
However, simply being a low-price alternative to an existing technology is typically insufficient to disrupt an existing market. Disruption requires that the new technology improve dramatically over time along attributes valued by mainstream customers, while still maintaining its appeal to initial niche adopters. Disruption is thus, at its core, a dynamic process in which technological improvement is critical.
We propose a novel model of FOSS disruption that consists of two distinct stages: an initial incubation stage I-Stage and a subsequent snowball stage S-Stage. During the I-Stage, the software is developed and improved until it reaches a threshold level of functionality and compatibility with existing practices. These improvements along the organizational adoptability dimension may permit the software to attract a critical mass of adopters.
Most FOSS projects, despite possessing the advantages of low cost and flexibility, simply fail to achieve adoption beyond the original development team. Of the more than 75, projects hosted on SourceForge. For the small proportion of FOSS projects that attract a critical mass of adoption, the internal mechanisms used during the I-Stage to achieve the critical mass are seldom transparent and can vary significantly from project to project.
In many prominent FOSS projects, the threshold level of organizational adoptability was achieved through the efforts of a single individual or by a small number of individual hackers. In other cases, the threshold was achieved when the property rights holder granted source code for an established product to the FOSS community.
An increasingly common means of achieving organizational adoptability is for a for-profit firm to develop a fully-functional product under an open source license with the expectation of selling complementary commercial products and services Dahlander, Regardless of the internal mechanisms of the I-Stage, some FOSS projects rate sufficiently high along the organizational adoptability dimension to attract a critical mass and make the transition to the S- Stage.
The S-Stage is characterized by gradual, but cumulatively significant changes in both the adoption and improvement mechanisms of the technology. The change in adoption mechanism occurs as attributes of organizational adoptability that is, properties of the technology itself become relatively less important than attributes of community adoptability.
For example, adoption beyond a niche typically requires what Moore calls a whole product solution—the provision of complementary products such as middleware for connections to existing systems and services such as consulting and education from propagating organizations. We define the transition from the I-Stage to the S-Stage in terms of a critical mass of adopters rather than a critical level of functionality or relative advantage because of the recursive interdependence between adoption and improvement during the S-Stage.
Non-developers may contribute to the project in other important ways, such as clarifying requirements, submitting bug reports, or providing valuable knowledge to other users through discussion forums and mailing lists. Even users who do nothing other than download the software and thus apparently free ride on the efforts of project participants can contribute incrementally to the increasing returns associated with FOSS adoption. For example, the decision by providers of complementary products to support a particular FOSS project often depends critically on the size of the installed base of users.
These indirect increasing returns to adoption in FOSS occur independently of the existence of any direct network benefits associated with the technology itself.
Thus, a project, such as the Apache web server, can achieve dominance due to learning-by-using during the S-Stage even though the software itself exhibits only weak network benefits. This can occur if the market has already tipped in favor of an incumbent or if several similar and competing technologies split the pool of early adopters so no technology achieves critical mass. First, the I-Stage results in development effort that moves the technology from the experimental quadrant to the niche quadrant.
The strong network benefits thus occur at the protocol level, rather than the level of the application software that implements the protocols. Second, in the absence of barriers such as prior technology drag, the S-Stage results in improvements that move the technology from the niche quadrant to the dominant technology quadrant. Adoption in the S-Stage is driven primarily by the effects of increasing returns and determinants of community adoptability, rather than the intrinsic attributes of the technology.
The flow chart in Figure 3 summarizes the main determinants of adoption and disruption that our model posits in terms of four sequential questions: 1 Does the software have sufficient organizational adoptability to attract a niche of adopters? The transition from the experimental to niche quadrant for the NCSA server occurred because of development subsidized by the US government. First, the emergence of standard protocols eliminated the major sources of lock-in and prior technology drag in the web server market.
In their survey of adoption of security-related modules by Apache users, Franke and von Hippel found that lead-user development played an important role in the provision of modules.
They changed it shortly after. The Apache community formalized in as the Apache Foundation facilitated inputs by lead-users through effective patch management and emerged as a credible sponsor of the project.
The Apache Foundation has since become the sponsoring organization for a large number of FOSS projects, many of which have no direct relationship to web servers. In addition, the reaction of commercial incumbents to the entry of Eclipse both increased its community adoptability and reduced barriers to adoption. The membership of these former competitors in the Eclipse Foundation has increased expectations that the Eclipse platform will become a dominant standard.
In terms of organizational adoptability, both PostgreSQL and Interbase had significant technical advantages over MySQL, including support for atomic transactions and stored procedures.
However, such features mattered less to developers of dynamic web sites than stability, speed, and simplicity—particular strengths for MySQL. Dynamic website development was a relatively new activity that was not particularly well served by the commercial incumbents. Adner has shown that the heterogeneity in consumer requirements that leads to segmentation becomes less important as performance of products in all segments exceed customer requirements.
The grant to the open source community of two enterprise-level databases, SAP DB and Ingres, plus the emergence of EnterpriseDB a commercially-supported version of PostgreSQL reduces the incentive for developers who require enterprise-level functionality and performance to add this capability to MySQL. The original product, known as StarOffice, was created by StarDivision, a commercial firm, but was purchased by Sun Microsystems in Sun released the source code for the product to the Open Office project in , but continues to develop a commercial version of StarOffice that includes a number of proprietary enhancements to the OpenOffice core.
The I-Stage development of OpenOffice thus resembles the early development of Eclipse: a fledgling, but viable, product was purchased by a large software vendor and released as a fully-functional FOSS project. The organizational adoptability of the niche product rested on two advantages over Microsoft Office: the ability to run on multiple platforms and the absence of a licensing fee. Despite its promising start, however, OpenOffice remains in the niche quadrant for three reasons.
First, Microsoft Office imposes significant prior technology drag. Although OpenOffice is almost fully compatible with Microsoft Office, the lack of full compatibility imposes costs on those who choose not to participate in the dominant Microsoft Office network. Second, OpenOffice suffers from a relative disadvantage in the number and quality of complementary products such as learning materials, templates, and add-ins.
Although we argued above that firm-level contributions can overcome the separation between user and developer, the components of the OpenOffice suite are primarily intended for individual use within the firm, not firm-level use.
Firms may be willing to underwrite improvements to an enterprise database or web server at the core of their enterprises. To this point, however, they have been less willing to pay to fix stability problems or interface annoyances in a PowerPoint clone. The barriers to adoption imposed by Microsoft Office combined with the lack of strong mechanisms for firm- or individual-level user development prevent OpenOffice from achieving the S-Stage improvement required for transition to the dominant technology quadrant.
Barring an exogenous and significant increase in community adoptability—for example, widespread legislation mandating the use of non-proprietary file formats by government agencies— OpenOffice will remain in the niche quadrant and fail to achieve dominant status. Eclipse is almost certain to achieve dominance, given the supportive response from commercial incumbents and the potential for significant learning-by- using effects in a market in which all users are software developers.
OpenOffice, in contrast, illustrates the failure of a major FOSS project to ignite the virtuous cycle of S-Stage adoption and improvement despite offering a base level of functionality that is comparable to commercial competitors. The I-Stage investment required to move a technology or product from the experimental quadrant to the niche quadrant is significant.
Grants to the FOSS community of commercial products with established niches have become increasingly common, especially for products that have failed to achieve the dominant position in tippy markets. Once in the niche quadrant, the forces of community adoption appear to be more important than the overall organizational adoptability of the technology. S-Stage improvement leads to increasing adoption and increasing adoption feeds further S-Stage improvement.
For Apache, Eclipse, and, to a lesser extent, MySQL, lead-user development continues to be the dominant improvement mechanism because many users of such products have strong technical skills. On the other hand, all three of the disruptive FOSS projects have benefited from open industry standards, which have reduced or eliminated prior technology drag. Community adoptability becomes more difficult to assess when multiple FOSS projects compete against one another. The probability that multiple FOSS projects achieve niche status within the same market segment increases as commercial products are converted to FOSS projects.
As the economics of technology standards literature shows, predicting the dominant technology in such cases is extremely difficult. At its most basic level, CRM software provides the data and interfaces necessary for sales force automation. All three types of enterprise software involve significant organization-wide commitments to shared processes and infrastructure. Moreover, all three provide support for important, but ultimately non-strategic, business processes.
We therefore believe that our model and analysis extend beyond the case of CRM and apply to enterprise software generally. Commercial CRM software firms can be divided into three major strategic groups.
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In contrast, the number of African-American adopted students appear to have fallen. But one thing remains to be the same, at least. The majority of adoptive parents are white, well-informed, older and financially capable of raising children.
You may also see sample paper templates. How Adoption is Finalized If you are ready to take on the job of being a legal parent and went through all the necessary steps, from talking to an adoption counselor to communicating with foster care and settling terms with the birth parents, then the final stage of the adoption process will be something you can really look forward to.
Finalization is when the legal proceedings for adoption are completed and your child then becomes an official member of the family. You may also see lined paper templates in PDF. To reach finalization, there are three steps that adoptive parents must do: 1. The estimated clearing time is usually between 7 to 10 business days.
You may also see white paper templates. You may also see a sample of papers. You may also see business paper templates. After the finalization hearing, you are then granted legal custody of the child and awarded the adoption decree, with the domestic adoption process done and completed, and everyone can go home happy.
It means you should congratulate yourself for having gone through the process of adopting a child or kid that won your heart, which you will now be able to tuck in bed and kiss goodnight.
Case studies are used throughout to illustrate the points made and useful appendices include a sample of a disruption report. Hedi Argent is an independent adoption consultant, trainer and freelance writer.
A comprehensive book, the layout is clear and the case examples pertinent. The text is both purposeful and sensitive. There are many things I like about this book: The detailed information on preparing for, undertaking, and writing up a disruption meeting; the comprehensive chapter on the impact of disruption for all involved. The appendices also contain excellent information e. This book is highly recommended.
Children Australia. A methodology for quantifying the potential need for adoption support services 3. A Governing body for adoption support services with representation from Health Services, Education Services, and Adopters 4. A multi-agency, multi-professional service delivery model 5. Provision of information about services 6.
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