An Empirical Investigation on the Motivations for the Adoption of Open Source Software

Abstract — Open Source Software has evolved dramatically in the last twenty years and now many open source products are considered similar, or better, than proprietary solutions. The result is that the trustworthiness of some open source products is now very high and the motivations for adopting an open source product over a proprietary product has changed in the last ten years. For this reason, we ran a mixed research approach, composed of three empirical studies, so as to identify the motivations for the adoption of open source products. The goal is to take a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in FLOSS motivation’s adoption. Results show that the economical aspects and the freedom of some type of licenses are not the main adoption drivers any more while other motivations such as the ease of customization and ethical reasons are currently considered more important