Case Study on Non-Adoption of Open Source
The following study has been making the rounds lately, but it’s also worth keeping track of here, for future reference.
Living in a world where most companies and small businesses I know are comfortable with open source and most already use it to a greater or lesser extent, it’s even more important to understand those who don’t use it and the smaller set of those who deliberately decide not to adopt open source yet. This knowledge will hone our development and promotion efforts to address those users’ needs in future revisions.
An academic paper written by Huysmans, Ven, and Verelst entitled Reasons for the Non-Adoption of OpenOffice.org in a Data-Intensive Public Administration is an informative resource for this purpose.
The paper’s abstract reads:
“Several academic studies have already been conducted to investigate the reasons influencing the adoption of open source desktop software such as Linux and OpenOffice.org. However, few studies have been devoted to determine the reasons for not adopting open source desktop software. In order to address this issue, we present a case study on the Belgian Federal Public Service (FPS) Economy which considered the use of OpenOffice.org, but eventually decided not to adopt OpenOffice.org as their primary office suite. This decision was to a large degree influenced by the fact that a large number of users within the FPS Economy perform data–intensive tasks such as statistical data analysis and reporting on a daily basis. Notwithstanding the fact that several reasons were actually in favor of the migration, we have identified several barriers that may discourage the use of OpenOffice.org in similar environments.”
The entire paper is available online at the link above for a detailed reading.