Outsourcing of Community Source: Identifying Motivations and Benefits

Community-based open source, or “community sourceâ€, has emerged as an innovative approach to developing open-source enterprise application software (EAS). Unlike the conventional model of in-house development, community source creates a virtual software development community that pools human, financial, and technological resources from multiple partner organizations to develop custom software solutions. The solution is available as open-source software to all end users. In this way, the community source model takes a step forward from outsourcing to third-party software vendors. By studying a real-world case of the Kuali community source project, the authors found that community source faced a number of challenges in project management, particularly in the areas of in-house staffing and project sustainability. The interview analysis further concludes that outsourcing the community source development to either domestic or foreign third-party vendors could be a viable solution. Finally, the authors propose a research framework and seven related propositions that warrant future investigation into the relationship between community source and software outsourcing.