Open Source Adoption Factors—A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Nowadays, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software (FLOSS) is becoming a strategic option for many organizations in the public and the private sector. The lack of well defined guidelines for IT managers may jeopardize the FLOSS adoption process. FLOSS adoption procedures are developed ad-hoc in every organization, hence, leading to potential wheel reinvention situations. Identifying factors that influence and determine adoption is crucial. In this article, we survey existing literature through systematic review methodologies to make visible the technical, organizational and economic factors that must be evaluated in the adoption process. We also provide hints for researchers on publications and the type of research that already covered this topic in the past. We studied almost 500 papers from which we selected a final set of 54 primary studies directly related to FLOSS adoption. We found twenty-two different adoption factors categorized as technical (nine), organizational (nine) and economic (four). This article aims to provide the basic building blocks to step into the creation of a guide for the FLOSS adoption. All the data we used in this study is available at this online repository: https://github.com/jagalindo/rea.victor.19-foss and doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2632543.

Keywords

• Free software adoption
• open source adoption
• libre software adoption