Open Source in Development: Enabling Business and Services

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role of open source participation and employment in the service industry in development. We statistically analyze country-level data from publicly available global databases. The findings suggest that open source participation and employment in the service industry are together and individually positive moderators in the positive correlation of new business formation and development outcomes. This paper contributes to socioeconomic development by identifying ways in which open source participation contributes to development.

KEYWORDS:

• New business formation
• development outcomes
• ICT4D
• open source software
• employment in service industry
• innovation
• entrepreneurship
• type of economy

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments on earlier multiple versions of this paper. In particular, the authors are grateful to Narcyz Roztocki and Renata Gabryelczyk for offering multiple rounds of detailed feedback to help us strengthen the contributions of the research presented in this paper.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. Information about approved open source licenses: https://opensource.org/licenses.

2. The count has probably increased by several million by the time of publication. https://github.com/about.

3. SourceForge has been around longer but has lost popularity to GitHub. https://sourceforge.net/about.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Georg J. P. Link

Georg J. P. Link earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, USA. He contributed to open source for 13+ years and co-founded the Linux Foundation CHAOSS project (Community Health Analytics Open Source Software). Link holds a M.Sc. in Business Information Systems from the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, an MBA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA, and a B.A. in Business Administration from the WelfenAkademie, Germany. Link published in the Communications of the Association for Information Systems, the Journal of Universal Computer Science, and the Journal of Peer Production. Link received the AIS Doctoral Student Service Award 2017.

Jolanta Kowal

Jolanta Kowal is Assistant Professor at the University of Wrocław, Institute of Psychology, Poland, Jungian analyst (IAAP), and Senior President of Polish Chapter of AIS. Her research interests include methodology of socio-economic sciences, economic psychology, management, and multicultural influences of psychoanalysis. She published in the journal of Information Systems Management, Information Technology for Development, the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, the Journal of Global Information Technology Management, and in proceedings of AMCIS, HICSS, IEEE, and ICTM. She is an associate editor for the journal Information Technology for Development, for the journal Information Systems Management, among many others.

Sajda Qureshi

Sajda Qureshi is Kayser Professor and Director of the Information Technology for Development Cloud Computing Lab at the College of Information Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology for Development; and President of the AIS Special Interest Group for Global Development (GlobDev). Since 10 years, she co-chairs the Annual ICIS SIGGlobDev workshop and HICSS ITD mini-track. She secured 1.1 million dollars in grants and contracts. She has about 200 publications including in IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication, Group Decision and Negotiation, Information Infrastructure and Policy, and Communications of the ACM.