Doing business with open source: an analysis of Italian OSS firms

The paper presents an ongoing research project and discusses its preliminary results. The aim of the research project is that of understanding whether Open source has become mainstream (Fitzgerald, 2006) and a commercially viable model for firms operating in the market for software and related services. The characteristics of the supply of Open Source Software and related services have been overlooked by much research in management and economics, which focused mostly on the specificities of the development process, on issues related to developers' motivations and the pe- culiar structure of incentives to knowledge creation, diffusion and appropriation. On the other hand, industrial and professional sources have put the market for Open Source software under scrutiny, highlighting the existence of a mature and receptive demand. Supply of solutions and services has been taken in consideration only recently, in particular by literature on open source business models and by research efforts attempting to provide a dimension of the supply of open source solutions and to characterize the strategies of open source firms. Our research aims at contributing to such an endeavor, providing an articulated description of the dimen- sions of the supply of open source software in Italy, of the characteristics of the companies provid- ing open source software and related service and of their strategies.. The paper articulates the work- ing hypothesis of open source normalization as derived from Fitzgerald (2006) and provides an overview of the preliminary evidence collected together with a description of the following steps we will take in our research project.