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ICC Advance Access originally published online on December 24, 2008
Industrial and Corporate Change 2009 18(3):435-471; doi:10.1093/icc/dtn046
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved.

Champions of revealing—the role of open source developers in commercial firms

Joachim Henkel*

Correspondence: Joachim Henkel, Schöller Chair in Technology and Innovation Management: Technische Universität München, Arcisstr. 21, D–80333 Munich, Germany. e-mail: henkel{at}wi.tum.de

The link between firms engaging in open source software (OSS) development and the OSS community is established by individual developers. This linkage might entail a principal-agent issue due to the developer's double allegiance to firm and OSS community, and expose the firm to the risk of losing intellectual property. Using both interviews and a large-scale survey, I substantiate the importance of the developer's role. However, neither interview data nor regression analysis show indications of commercially harmful revealing behavior induced by "Free Software ideology." Management, on the other hand, sometimes seems to be overly concerned about openness. I conclude that a more positive stance towards openness will allow firms to better share in the benefits of open innovation processes.

*I am grateful to two anonymous referees, Oliver Alexy, Eric Brousseau, Linus Dahlander, Marc Gruber, Dietmar Harhoff, Jesper Holck, Simone Käs, Inna Lyubareva, Reinhilde Veugelers, Eric von Hippel, Li Yan, and seminar participants at Paris X Nanterre, BETA (Strasbourg), the 3rd International Workshop on User Innovation (MIT), and the 5th EPIP Conference for helpful comments. I thank Mark Tins for valuable help in data collection. All errors are mine.


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