❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳

❘❊❙❊❆❘❈❍ ❲❖❘❑■◆● P❆P❊❘

Cooperation among competitors in the

open-source arena
The case of OpenStack[1]
Jose Apolinario Teixeira1* , Salman Qayyum Mian2 and Ulla Hytti1
*
Correspondence:
jose.teixeira@utu.fi Abstract
1
Turku School of Economics,
University of Turku, Turun Interorganizational interactions are often complex and paradoxical. In this
yliopisto, 20014 Turku, Finland research, we transcend two management paradoxes: competition versus
Full list of author information is
cooperation and open-source versus proprietary technology development. We
available at the end of the article
follow the OpenStack open-source ecosystem where competing firms
cooperate in the joint-development of a cloud infrastructure for big data. We
provide a narrative, complemented with social network visualizations,
which depicts the evolution of cooperation and competition. Our findings
suggest that development transparency and weak intellectual property rights
(i.e., characteristics of open-source ecosystems) allow a focal firm to transfer
information and resources more easily between multiple alliances.
Keywords: alliances; business ecosystems; coopetition; open-coopetition;
open-source

I. Introduction

O
r g a n i z at i o ns do not live in isolation; they are networked in nature. Many
firms, particularly in the high-tech industry, have increasingly engaged in
different kinds of cooperative interorganizational relationships (e.g., contractual
alliances, joint ventures, consortia, standards bodies and open-source communities)
to improve their resource endowment and manage strategic uncertainty (Chen and
Miller 2015; Eisenhardt 1989; Hoffmann 2007; Morgan et al. 2013). Consequently,
organizations are embedded in dynamic and cohesive networks where individual
and organizational actions are influenced by both their network and their network
position (Gomes-Casseres 1996; Granovetter 1973; Gulati and Gargiulo 1999; Uzzi
1996).
Scholars early recognized interorganizational relationships as an important
source of competitive advantage (Dyer and Singh 1998; Hoffmann 2007; Zaheer
et al. 2000). While interorganizational interactions have become more complex,
they have also become more paradoxical (Lewis 2000). Paradox pervades daily
life, and how to manage paradox has long been the subject of philosophical and
[1]
As accepted for presentation at the 2016 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS
2016), held in Dublin, Ireland, December 11-14, 2016. “IS in Organizations and Society” track. The offi-
cial conference proceedings are available at the AIS eLibrary (❤tt♣✿✴✴❛✐s❡❧✳❛✐s♥❡t✳♦r❣✴✐❝✐s✷✵✶✻✴).
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷ ♦❢ ✸✽

organizational inquiry (Chen 2008). Organizational researchers have previously

highlighted the significance of paradox in business practice, “excellent companies
have learned how to manage paradox” (Peters and Waterman 2004, p.100). Poole
and Van de Ven (1989, p.563) urged researchers to seek out forms of paradox and
look for theoretical tensions or oppositions to stimulate the development of more
encompassing theories (Smith and Lewis 2011).
In this research, we transcend two management paradoxes filled with theoretical
tension: competition versus cooperation and open-source versus proprietary technology
development. As a particularly vexing organizational paradox, competition versus
cooperation occupied historically a central position in management research (Chen
2008; Yami et al. 2010). With a stronger emphasis on R&D and innovation, the
paradox of open-source versus proprietary technology development has attracted
wide multi-disciplinary attention (Crowston et al. 2012; Raasch et al. 2013; von
Hippel and von Krogh 2003).
On the one hand, much literature addressing competition versus cooperation
stresses the concepts of intellectual property, cross-licensing, secrecy and gatekeep-
ing (Bengtsson and Kock 2014; Gnyawali and Park 2009; Ritala and Hurmelinna-
Laukkanen 2013). On the other hand, open-source versus proprietary technology
development stresses the concepts of freedom, transparency, openness and inclu-
siveness (Aksulu and Wade 2010; Bonaccorsi et al. 2006; Gacek and Arief 2004;
Raymond 1999; von Hippel and von Krogh 2003).
In this research, we explore "open-coopetition", a neologism recently proposed
by Teixeira and Lin (2014) to describe cooperation among competitors in the
open-source arena. There are several known cases of open-coopetition as captured
in Table 1. Cooperation among competitors in an open-source way has become
common in different R&D intensive sectors – it can be observed in the development
of web, cloud computing, mobile, automotive and medical technologies among
others.
Project Domain Examples of competing firms cooperating in the project

WebKit Web browsing technologies Apple, Nokia, Google, Samsung, Intel and BlackBerry
Blink Web browsing technologies Google, Opera, Intel and Samsung
OpenStack Cloud computing infrastructure Rackspace, Canonical, IBM, HP, Vmware and Citrix
CloudStack Cloud computing infrastructure Citrix, SunGard AS and ShapeBlue
Xen Virtualization technologies University of Cambridge, Citrix, IBM, HP and Red Hat
Hadoop Distributed computing technologies Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Jive, Microsoft and Hortonworks
Open Handset Alliance Mobile devices platform Google, LG, Samsung, HTC, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and NEC
Tizen Mobile devices platform Fujitsu, Huawei, NEC, Casio, Panasonic and Samsung
GENIVI Alliance In-Vehicle Infotainment platform Volvo, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Renault and PSA
Linux The Linux operating system Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Samsung, Hitachi and Red Hat
Yocto project Development tools for embedded Linux Broadcom, AMD, Texas Instruments and Intel
Linaro Development tools for embedded Linux ARM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments
Eclipse Software development environment Actuate, CA, IBM, Google, Oracle, SAP and Red Hat
OpenEMR Health records and medical practice software OEMR, EnSoftek, MI-Squared, ZH Healthcare and Visolve

Table 1 Known cases of cooperation among competitors in the open-source arena (i.e.
open-coopetition)

Even if cooperation among competitors and open-source software are phenom-

ena with recognized impact on how value is created, explored and exploited in
networked settings, there are very few studies addressing how rival firms simulta-
neously cooperate and compete in the open-source arena (Germonprez et al. 2013;
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸ ♦❢ ✸✽

Teixeira et al. 2015). From a practitioner’s viewpoint, this is unfortunate since

naive assumptions concerning “work with competitors” and “open-source work”
can lead in practice to opportunistic behavior, unintended spillover effects, and
loss of reputation and trust among partners (see Markus and Agres 2000; Noote-
boom et al. 1997; Park and Russo 1996; Sharma et al. 2002). Given the scarcity of
theory and empirical studies addressing this new phenomenon, we conducted this
exploratory case study guided by the broad and open research question: “‘how
competitors cooperate in open-source ecosystems?”.

II. Theoretical background

Strategic networks and ecosystems
Even if many see firms as distinct and autonomous units of action, it has been
both sighted and increasingly recognized that firms are embedded in networks
comprised of close, robust and multidimensional connections that that blur organi-
zational boundaries (Gilsing et al. 2008; Granovetter 1973; Powell and Smith-Doerr
1994; Rowley et al. 2004; Uzzi 1996). Organizational theory now stresses the need
to understand how the relational context in which firms are embedded influences
their behaviors (Gulati 1998; Rowley et al. 2004).
Early identified drivers of inter-firm cooperation include: reducing costs through
product rationalization and economies of scale (Contractor and Lorange 1992; Mar-
iti and Smiley 1983), sharing total risks and total costs of large projects (Baldi
2012; Harrigan 1988), accessing new knowledge and complementary assets (Kogut
1988; Teece 1992), developing technology and accessing complementary markets
(Cravens et al. 1996), co-creation/co-production of value (Chan et al. 1997; Ramirez
1999), solving market failures that emerge under conditions of bounded rationality
(Williamson 1985,9), shaping competition with the aim of increasing or decreas-
ing market competition (Fuller and Porter 1986; Garud and Kumaraswamy 1993),
faster access to new markets (Contractor and Lorange 1988; Hung et al. 2003),
gaining legitimacy and reputation (DiMaggio and Powell 2000; Greenwood and
Meyer 2008), securing investment (Guiso et al. 2004; Stam and Elfring 2008) and re-
ducing uncertainty from resource requirements (Pfeffer and Salancik 2003). Even if
most interorganizational research takes the point of view of a focal firm embedded
within one alliance it is known that uncertainty drives firms to establish a portfolio
of alliances – firms are often embedded in multiple strategic networks (Dreyfus
et al. 2005; Hoffmann 2007; Lavie and Miller 2008; Lavie and Singh 2012).
The ecosystem construct, as a way of making the networked interdependen-
cies of the firm more explicit, has gained prominence in both research and prac-
tice (Adner 2006; Iansiti and Levien 2004a; Moore 1999). Theory underlying the
ecosystem construct have focused on understanding coordination among part-
ners in exchange networks that are characterized by simultaneous cooperation
and competition (Afuah 2000; Brandenburger and Nalebuff 2011). Studies in this
arena have explored the challenges that arise when incentives across the ecosys-
tem are not aligned (Casadesus-Masanell and Yoffie 2007), the role of established
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✹ ♦❢ ✸✽

relationships with ecosystem partners in shaping firms motivations to compete

for different market segments (Christensen and Rosenbloom 1995), the activities
that focal firms undertake to induce exchange partners to favor their specific tech-
nology platforms (Gawer and Cusumano 2002), and the flow of activity among
partner firms (Adner and Kapoor 2010).
In our view, the ecosystems construct stresses the importance of actor-to-actor
networked relationships. Therefore, our view on strategic networks (Gulati 1998;
Jarillo 1988; Rusko 2014; Zaheer et al. 2000) and ecosystems (Adner 2006; Ian-
siti and Levien 2004a; Moore 1999) approximates what others called "networked
collaborations" (Normann and Ramirez 1993); "lattices" (Gore 1985), "webs" (Hast-
ings 1993), "constellations" (Normann and Ramirez 1994), "holonic organizations"
(McHugh et al. 1995), "interfaces" (Gilmore and Krantz 1991), "organizations net-
works" (Perrow 1972), "inter-organizational domain" (Trist 1977) and "infrastruc-
ture" (Tilson et al. 2010).
Prior research has considered mainly the independent motivations and oppor-
tunities that guide alliance formation at the dyad-level (Lavie and Singh 2012). In
this study, we explore the evolution of cooperation among competitors at multiple
levels; we examine relational interactions a the inter-individual, inter-firm and
inter-ecosystem level (i.e., zooming in and out). As pointed out by Ibarra et al.
(2005), distinctive issues concerned with the alignment of individual and collective
networking interests should not be separated.

Cooperation among competitors

As pointed out by the literature on business ecosystems, strategic cooperation
among competitors (aka coopetition) in not uncommon (Clarysse et al. 2014; Iansiti
and Levien 2004b). The phenomenon can be found, for instance in the automotive
industry. The city car models Toyota Aygo, Peugeot 108 and Citroën C1 share the
same body and equipment. In fact, they are made in the same factory, as a result
of a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corporation and PSA Peugeot Citroën. In
the pharmaceutical industry, 10 giants leading the industry founded TransCeler-
ate BioPharma “as a nonprofit, precompetitive drug company, to develop shared
industry clinical-trial solutions”. Also in the airline industry, dyadic alliances and
multilateral alliances have blurred the borders between airline companies over the
last two decades (Gudmundsson and Lechner 2006). Competition between airlines
is less a matter of individual firms competing against individual firms but rather
of airline alliances against airline alliances (Gomes-Casseres 1994). In the computer
and mobile-devices industry, it is also known that Apple, Google and Samsung
among others, have cooperated in the development of open-source web-browsing
technologies, even while fighting patent-wars (Teixeira and Lin 2014).
On one hand, economists have addressed the phenomenon through public and
macroeconomic perspectives. For example, Ausubel (1991); Rochet and Tirole
(2002); Schmalensee (2002) have addressed cooperation among competitors in
ATM and card-payment payment systems. Much of this work, follows the neo-
classical theory in economics in assuming that competition generates economic
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✺ ♦❢ ✸✽

efficiency (Lado et al. 1997). Antitrust and regulatory policies prohibit many agree-
ments or practices that restrict free trading and competition between businesses
(European Commission 2001; Federal Trade Commission 2000).
In parallel, research on alliances within strategic management gives “important
insight into the advantages that can be obtained by cooperation and the prerequi-
sites needed for an alliance to work, but it is primarily the cooperative dimension
of the relationship that is emphasized” (Bengtsson and Kock 2000). More recently,
Gulati et al. (2012) claimed that important streams of research on alliances re-
main single-mindedly focused on the cooperation perspective. Summing up, from
the individual and firm perspective, competition is not necessarily socially desir-
able (Loury 1979). However, from a public and macroeconomics perspectives, the
existence of competition is essential for welfare (Pigou 2013).
Although competition and cooperation have individually received much consid-
eration, given limited attention to the fundamental issue of the interplay between
the two concepts (Chen 2008; Chen and Miller 2015). Even if strategic management
literature noted the importance of understanding open-source software from its
competitive-cooperative angles (see Bengtsson et al. 2010; Chen and Miller 2015;
McGaughey 2002), very few empirical cases exploring cooperation among com-
petitors in open-source arena exist. A few notable exceptions here are the studies
by Germonprez et al. (2013); Linåker et al. (2016); Teixeira and Lin (2014); Teixeira
et al. (2015).

Open-source software under a network perspective

Much of the innovative programming that powers software applications, operating
systems, clouds servers and the Internet is the result of “open-source” code – that
is, code that is freely distributed as opposed to being kept secret.
Consistently across recent reviews (Aksulu and Wade 2010; Crowston et al. 2012;
Teixeira and Baiyere 2014), there is a general consensus that “open-source” (also
known as free-software or software libre) emerged with a set of four freedoms as
suggested by Stallman (1985). These freedoms laid down the foundations for the
open-source software as known today: 1) the freedom to run the program, for any
purpose; 2) the freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does
your computing as you wish; 3) the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help
your neighbor; And 4), the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions
to others.
The free software idea did not immediately become mainstream, and industry
was especially suspicious of it. In 1998, the ’hacking’ activists Bruce Perens and
Eric Raymond agreed that a significant part of the problem resided in Stallman’s
term ’free software’, which might understandably have an ominous ring to the
ears of business people. Accordingly they, along with other prominent hackers,
founded the ’open-source” software movement (Perens 1999). “Open-source” soft-
ware incorporates essentially the same licensing practices as those pioneered by
the free software movement. It differs from that movement primarily on philo-
sophical grounds, preferring to emphasize the practical benefits of such licensing
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✻ ♦❢ ✸✽

practices over issues regarding the moral rightness and importance of granting
users the freedoms offered by both free and open-source software (von Hippel
and von Krogh 2003).
From an innovation studies perspective, Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) and
von Hippel (2005) suggested that open-source software development shows that
users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems and freely
reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the
software. Such “free” user-to-user assistance has turned open-source into a re-
markable example of user-innovation (von Hippel 2009). It was also reported
that the open-source trend has been so strong that previous, rather monolithic,
organizations (e.g., SAP, Intel, Apple, Philips, Xerox, and IBM among others) de-
centralized research labs, open up proprietary technology, and increased their
absorptive capacity for outside-in innovation processes within open-source ecosys-
tems (Chesbrough et al. 2006; Enkel et al. 2009; Gassmann et al. 2010).
The open-source software phenomenon keeps evolving from the earliest purist
views focusing on freedom (Stallman 1985) to newer perspectives considering
open-source as an alternative and viable way of doing business (Ågerfalk and
Fitzgerald 2008; Feller and Fitzgerald 2002; Fitzgerald 2006). Moreover, the phe-
nomenon has expanded from open-source software to open-data (Gurstein 2011;
Janssen et al. 2012), open-hardware (Maharaj et al. 2008; Söderberg 2013), open-
knowledge (Awazu and Desouza 2004), open-access (Antelman 2004; Davis et al.
2008; Swan 2007), and open-medicine (Bradner 2011; Open Medicine Institute
2015), among other manifestations of increasing openness in the way of doing
things. Even if the open-source phenomenon started to attract early scholarly at-
tention in computer science and software engineering, the phenomenon is more
recently capturing the largest interest from business and management scholars
(Raasch et al. 2013). Therefore, as pointed out by Carillo and Bernard (2015); von
Krogh and Spaeth (2007), information systems as a discipline is well positioned to
be at the center of trans-disciplinary research addressing the phenomenon.

III. Empirical background

The cloud computing industry
Since our paper is about cooperation and competition, it is important to mention
that the cloud computing business is dominated by a small number of players,
including 1) Amazon, a pioneer in cloud computing services selling the Amazon
EC2; 2) Google, selling services around its Compute Engine (Google Compute);
and 3) Microsoft, heavily marketing cloud strategies based on its Azure cloud
computing infrastructure (Microsoft Azure). Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do
not provide cloud infrastructure products, merely computing services. In practice
and if there were no alternatives, all cloud computation would run in hardware
and software infrastructures controlled by very few players. Such control from
the cloud computing service provider locks-in its customers (Armbrust et al. 2010;
Briscoe and Marinos 2009; Chow et al. 2009). Surprisingly, the leading product
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✽ ♦❢ ✸✽

200 firms and many non-affiliated individuals contributors pitch in to a set of

different open-source projects governed by the OpenStack Foundation[2] .
Both private companies (e.g., AT&T, AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Ericsson,
HP, IBM, Intel, and NEC, among many others) and public entities (e.g., NASA,
CERN, Johns Hopkins University, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Universidade
Federal de Campina Grande, and Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, among others)
work together with independent, non-affiliated developers in a scenario of pooled
R&D in an open-source way (i.e., emphasizing development transparency while
giving up intellectual property rights). We decided to address the OpenStack
case due to its perceived novelty, its high inter-networked nature (i.e., an “ecosys-
tem” involving many firms and individual contributors), its heterogeneity (i.e.,
an ecosystem involving both startups and high-tech corporate giants), its market-
size ($1.7bn, by 2016[3] ), its complexity (i.e., involving different programming lan-
guages, different operating systems, different hardware configurations) and its
size (17,020 community members, 100,000 code reviews, and 1,766,546 lines of
code[4] ).
Even if OpenStack emphasizes cooperation in the joint-development of a large
open-source ecosystem, there are many firms directly competing with each other
within the community. Among others, there is competition among providers of
public cloud services based on OpenStack (e.g., HP, Canonical, and Rackspace),
among providers of specialized hardware complementing OpenStack (e.g., HP,
IBM, and Nebula), and among providers of complementary commercial software
plug-ins complementing OpenStack (e.g., VMware, Citrix, and Cisco)[5] .

IV. Method
Our case relied on naturally occurring data which emerged per se on the Internet.
Such data are not a consequence of researchers’ own actions, but rather are created
and maintained by the OpenStack community in their own pursuits of developing
an open-source infrastructure for big data. In order to make sense of coopera-
tive and competitive behaviors within OpenStack, we have combined qualitative
analysis of archival data (QA), mining software repositories (MSR), and Social
Network Analysis (SNA) on publicly-available and naturally-occurring data from
the OpenStack Nova repository to reconstruct and visualize the evolution of co-
operation in a sequence of networks. Table 2 presents the set of multidisciplinary
methodological notes that guided our mixed methods research design.
We began our research in a qualitative way by screening publicly available data
such as company announcements, financial reports and specialized press reports,
which allowed us to review an immense amount of online information pertain-
ing to the competitive cloud computing industry. While taking into consideration
established methodological notes that legitimate the use of archival data when
[2] From a legal perspective, the OpenStack Foundation is a nonprofit, non-stock “foundation” within

the meaning of Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, “Delaware Corporate Law”.
[3] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✹✺✶r❡s❡❛r❝❤✳❝♦♠✴r❡♣♦rt✲s❤♦rt❄❡♥t✐t②■❞❂✽✷✺✾✸
[4] ❤tt♣✿✴✴♦♣❡♥s♦✉r❝❡✳❝♦♠✴❜✉s✐♥❡ss✴✶✹✴✻✴♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✲♥✉♠❜❡rs
[5] For a relational map of competition among OpenStack firms (see Teixeira et al. 2015).
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✾ ♦❢ ✸✽

Employed approach Established within Methodological notes

Eisenhardt (1989)
Case studya rooted on archival data Multidisciplinary Yin (2011)
Dubé and Paré (2003)
Kagdi et al. (2007)
Mining software repositories Software-Engineering Martinez-Romo et al. (2008)
Teixeira et al. (2015)
Freeman (2005)
Social network analysis Multidisciplinary Wasserman and Faust (1994)
Kane et al. (2014)
Hahn et al. (2008)
Information-Systems
Network analysis of digital trace data Howison et al. (2012)
Software-Engineering
Trier (2008)
Biomedicine Lundvall (1992)
Network analysis with emphasis on the
Bibliometrics Cambrosio et al. (2004)
visualization of cooperative activities
Innovation-Studies Teixeira et al. (2015)
aWe see case study as an umbrella term covering a group of research methods which focus on a particular
instance (see Adelman et al. 1976). Our case study depended on the use of – and ability to integrate
in converging fashion (some would say “triangulate”) – information from multiple sources of evidence.
The evidence included announcements, financial reports, specialized press reports and actual information
systems artifacts. To built around the consistency of complex data, we were forced to encapsulate different
qualitative, quantitative and social network analysis methods (see Ibarra et al. 2005; Yin 1997). After all,
“Using mixed methods within the confines of a single study can simultaneously broaden and strengthen
the study. ... The stronger the "mix" of methods throughout these procedures the more that researchers
can derive the benefits from using mixed approaches.” (Yin 2006).
❚❛❜❧❡ ✷ ❊♠♣❧♦②❡❞ ♠✉❧t✐❞✐s❝✐♣❧✐♥❛r② ♠❡t❤♦❞♦❧♦❣✐❝❛❧ ❣✉✐❞❡❧✐♥❡s

studying a case (Dubé and Paré 2003; Eisenhardt 1989; Flynn et al. 1990; Gibbert
et al. 2008; Shanks 2002; Yin 2011), we gained valuable insights from the industrial
context surrounding the OpenStack community. After attaining a better under-
standing of the industrial cooperative and competitive dynamics, we extracted
and analyzed the social network of the OpenStack Nova project by leveraging
SNA (Brandes et al. 2013; Scott 2012; Wasserman and Faust 1994).
As in Teixeira et al. (2015), we took advantage of naturally occurring digital
trace data (i.e., the OpenStack Nova project repository and its changelog) and built
cooperative social networks that were explored using a variety of tools: Gephi
(v0.8.2) (Bastian et al. 2009), Visone(v2.7.3) (Brandes and Wagner 2004), and the
sna (v2.3-2) and statnet (v2014.2.0) statistical modules (Butts 2010; Handcock et al.
2003) for R (v3.0.2) (R Core Team 2014). To better explore cooperation at the ecosys-
tems level, we also modeled cooperative relationships in the tri-dimensional (3D)
space using Blender (2.72). By mining digital traces of code cooperation, and by
uncovering the social structure of the OpenStack Nova project, the computerized
SNA also revealed key preliminary understandings of coopetition in the Open-
Stack ecosystem that were later re-investigated with complementary qualitative
data. The combination of methods was not only fundamental for the retrieval of
social structures, but also for explaining and them.
As in prior multi-disciplinary studies (Cambrosio et al. 2004; Glänzel and Schu-
bert 2005; Lundvall 1992; Porter et al. 2005; Teixeira et al. 2015), our analysis
emphasizes the visualization of the cooperation network, which evolves over time,
to reveal the dynamics among the OpenStack software developers. We then at-
tempted to understand the visualized networks with our acquired understanding
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✵ ♦❢ ✸✽

from the competitive cloud computing industry in general and OpenStack in

particular. The visualization, together with a deeper understanding of the phe-
nomenon under investigation, corresponds to the notion of figuration (Elias 1978;
Elias and Jephcott 1982; Smith 2001) as pointed out in several studies (Cambrosio
et al. 2004; Gfaller 1993; Newton 2001).
Studies that take an SNA approach are long established in organizational re-
search in general (Cross et al. 2002; Kane et al. 2014; Rowley et al. 2005; Tichy
et al. 1979; Tsai 2002; Uzzi 1997), and in open-source research in particular (Crow-
ston and Howison 2005; Geipel and Schweitzer 2012; Martinez-Romo et al. 2008;
Zanetti et al. 2013). Even so, few studies have exploited the potential of social
network visualizations for exploratory research, as recommended by Freeman
(2005). By capturing the evolution of cooperative and competitive behaviors at
the individual, firm and ecosystem levels, our multi-method approach aims to
contribute to a broader range of methodologies capable of bridging the gap be-
tween causal processes at the macro-structural organization and those operating
at the individual level (see Ibarra et al. 2005). We also argue, that our SNA ap-
proach integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence contributes to bridging
the qualitative-quantitative divide in information systems research (see Ågerfalk
2013; Oinas-Kukkonen et al. 2010; Venkatesh et al. 2013).

V. Results
We present our results in a narrative format complemented with “pictures” of the
evolving social structure of OpenStack. Such narrative, concerned with how ac-
tors simultaneously cooperate and compete in the development of an open-source
socio-technical ecosystems, aggregates theoretical issues that are later addressed
in the discussion section. Such narrative, built on both quantitative and qualita-
tive evidence, contributes to the understanding of a rather new and unexplored
phenomenon and its embedded paradoxes (i.e., open-coopetition).
We start by quoting the words of Jim Curry in one of the first announcements
of the OpenStack project. The founding leader of the OpenStack community starts
by advocating the freedom of open-source software before stating the mission of
the the OpenStack project. It is important to notice that Jim Curry emphasizes the
roles of NASA and Rackspace as initial contributors to the project – that is, the
project did not start from “ground zero”.

“What is OpenStack? Well, our mission statement says this: To produce the
ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public
and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively
scalable. That is a big ambition. The good news is that OpenStack is starting
with code contributions from two organizations that know how to build
and run massively scalable clouds – Rackspace and NASA. — Jim Curry,
OpenStack Lead, 19 July 2010[6]

[6] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✳♦r❣✴❜❧♦❣✴✷✵✶✵✴✵✼✴✐♥tr♦❞✉❝✐♥❣✲♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✴
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✶ ♦❢ ✸✽

Visualizations in Figures 2 to 9 provide an understanding of how key players in

the cloud computing industry cooperate in an open-source ecosystem. The size of a
node is dependent on its degree-centrality – in other words, the larger the node, the
more social connections the developer has. The value of degree-centrality depends
on the number of adjacent nodes with which a node is connected. Therefore, the
higher a developer’s degree-centrality, the more likely he/she is to be cooperating
with others.

citrix

rackspace

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✷ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❆✉st✐♥ t♦ t❤❡ ❇❡①❛r r❡❧❡❛s❡

Figure 2 captures the cooperation in the OpenStack Nova project from the ❆✉st✐♥
to the ❇❡①❛r release, from October 21st 2010 to February 3rd 2011. From it, we can
derive the cooperation between software developers affiliated with companies;
for example, Citrix had three developers working on the project together with
Rackspace.

“OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of

cloud standards and interoperability.” .... “As a longtime technology partner
with Rackspace, Citrix will cooperate closely with the community to pro-
vide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling
products.” — Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Citrix, 19 July 2010 [7]

Citrix who had worked before with Rackspace, wanted to make sure that their
XenServer platforms would be conveniently integrated with Rackspace’s plans for
OpenStack.

“The project is exhibiting the key benefits that the industry derives from suc-
cessful open-source cooperation: rapid development, faster testing, feedback
and project turn around, broader industry adoption and learning through
implementation and de-facto standardization whilst avoiding the prospect
of commoditization.
[7] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳r❛❝❦s♣❛❝❡✳❝♦♠✴❜❧♦❣✴♥❡✇s❛rt✐❝❧❡s✴r❛❝❦s♣❛❝❡✲♦♣❡♥✲s♦✉r❝❡s✲❝❧♦✉❞✲♣❧❛t❢♦r♠
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✷ ♦❢ ✸✽

It has been rewarding to work with the OpenStack crew, and to have ex-
perienced first hand the dedication to an open, code-rules, community-first
approach taken by the project leaders.” — Simon Crosby, CTO, Citrix 21
October 2010 [8]

citrix

cloudscale

rackspace

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✸ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❇❡①❛r t♦ ❈❛❝t✉s r❡❧❡❛s❡

Our second visualization with degree-centrality, in Figure 3, captures the coop-

eration from the ❇❡①❛r to the ❈❛❝t✉s release (from February 3rd 2011 to April
15th 2011). From this visualization we can observe a new node, a developer affili-
ated with Cloudscaling. Cloudscaling was founded in 2006 by the cloud architect
and open-source software advocate Randy Bias and co-founder Adam Waters. It
started as a professional services company selling custom cloud infrastructure for
large service providers. They had ’Korea Telecom’ as an early customer, for which
the company in 2010 designed and deployed the first OpenStack-based storage
cloud outside Rackspace.

“Earlier this week, one of our clients, a Tier 1 ISP, launched an object storage
cloud based on OpenStack, an open-source compute and storage framework
created by Rackspace and NASA. The new storage cloud is the first commer-
cial OpenStack-based storage offering in the market after Rackspace itself,
which is based on the same technology.” – Joe Arnold, Director of engineer-
ing, Cloudscaling, 31 of January 2011[9]

Our visualization in Figure 4 captures cooperation from the ❈❛❝t✉s to the ❉✐❛❜❧♦
release (from April 15th 2011 to September 22nd 2011). HP (a well-known IT multi-
national company), Mirantis (an OpenStack startup), and Red Hat (the company
behind the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and sponsor of the Fedora Linux distribu-
tions) joined the coopetitive software development efforts.
[8] ❤tt♣✿✴✴❜❧♦❣s✳❝✐tr✐①✳❝♦♠✴✷✵✶✵✴✶✵✴✷✶✴✐❢✲②♦✉✈❡✲s❡❡♥✲♦♥❡✲r❡❞✇♦♦❞✲②♦✉✈❡✲s❡❡♥✲t❤❡♠

✲❛❧❧✴
[9] ❤tt♣✿✴✴❝❧♦✉❞s❝❛❧✐♥❣✳❝♦♠✴❜❧♦❣✴❝❧♦✉❞✲❝♦♠♣✉t✐♥❣✴♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✲♦❜❥❡❝t✲st♦r❛❣❡✲♠♦✈❡s

✲❜❡②♦♥❞✲r❛❝❦s♣❛❝❡✴
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✸ ♦❢ ✸✽

cannonical

citrix

cloudscale

hp

ibm

mirantis

nebula

rackspace

redhat

developer
vmware & a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✹ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❈❛❝t✉s t♦ t❤❡ ❉✐❛❜❧♦ r❡❧❡❛s❡

Mirantis was founded in January of 2011 by Boris Renski Jr. and Alex Freedland.
Also born in Northern California, this startup marketed itself as a “pure-play”
OpenStack company and started working early with Red Hat. Besides cooperating
in the development of OpenStack, both firms partnered in implementation and
integration services at common customers[10]
In the meantime, HP started marketing their cloud computing services based
on OpenStack. HP markets itself as the leading corporation behind the project,
emphasizing that OpenStack is the only cloud computing solution without a single-
vendor lock-in but with an extensive ecosystem behind it[11] .

cannonical

citrix

cloudscale

hp

ibm

mirantis

rackspace

redhat

intel

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✺ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❉✐❛❜❧♦ t♦ t❤❡ ❊ss❡① r❡❧❡❛s❡

Figure 5 depicts the cooperation from the ❉✐❛❜❧♦ to the ❊ss❡① release (from
September 22nd 2011 to April 5th 2012). Although the graph becomes more dense,
we can visualize new nodes representing early contributions of Intel (investing on
the compatibility of OpenStack with Intel microprocessors) and IBM. The later had
[10] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳r❡❞❤❛t✳❝♦♠✴❡♥✴❛❜♦✉t✴♣r❡ss✲r❡❧❡❛s❡s✴r❡❞✲❤❛t✲❛♥❞✲♠✐r❛♥t✐s✲♣❛rt♥❡r

✲❛❝r♦ss✲♣r♦❞✉❝ts✲❛♥❞✲s❡r✈✐❝❡s
[11] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✽✳❤♣✳❝♦♠✴❤✷✵✻✷✶✴✈✐❞❡♦✲❣❛❧❧❡r②✴✉s✴❡♥✴❡✈❡♥ts✴❡♥t❡r♣r✐s❡✴❤♣✲❞✐s❝♦✈❡r

✲✷✵✶✶✴✷✼✾✸✼✾✾✶✹✶✵✵✶✴
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✹ ♦❢ ✸✽

a long history of working with open standards and open-source initiatives, such
as in the Apache and Eclipse projects, and has been able to sell complementary
solutions (i.e., hardware, software, and services) from open-source projects. It
expected the same business model to work well with OpenStack[12] .

cannonical

citrix

cloudscale

hp

ibm

mirantis

nebula

rackspace

redhat

vmware

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✻ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❊ss❡① t♦ t❤❡ ❋♦❧s♦♠ r❡❧❡❛s❡

Figure 6 shows the cooperation between the ❊ss❡① and the ❋♦❧s♦♠ release (from
April 5th 2012 to September 27th 2012). We can observe that the network becomes
more dense, as there are more developers working with each other. Even though
some of their developers continued contributing to the project, Citrix had by then
abandoned its OpenStack distribution in order to focus instead on the compet-
ing CloudStack cloud computing open-source ecosystem. Citrix decided to con-
tribute to the competing CloudStack software ecosystem under the umbrella of the
Apache Software Foundation, with a codebase resulting from the acquisition of
Cloud.com of July 2011. This turn of strategy from Citrix was related with Open-
Stack’s lack of integration with the Amazon’s APIs (Application Programming
Interfaces). Amazon is currently the leader of cloud services, and the migration
costs to another cloud computing infrastructure are very high, specially if the APIs
do not resemble each other.

“Amazon has in many ways invented and created this market, and with what
is projected to be $1 billion in ecosystem and customer revenue attached to
Amazon cloud, we believe the winning cloud platform will have to have a
high degree of interoperability with Amazon” – Sameer Dholakia, GM Cloud
Platforms Group, Citrix, 3 of April 2012[13]

“CloudStack has firmly aligned itself with the Amazon ecosystem. But Open-
Stack is an interesting case of an organization caught in the middle. Its ser-
vice provider supporters are fundamentally interested in competing against

[12] ❤tt♣✿✴✴t❤♦✉❣❤ts♦♥❝❧♦✉❞✳❝♦♠✴✷✵✶✷✴✵✾✴♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✲♣♦✐s❡❞✲t♦✲❧❡❛❞✲t❤❡✲✇❛②✲t♦✲♦♣❡♥

✲❝❧♦✉❞✲❝♦♠♣✉t✐♥❣✴
[13] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳♥❡t✇♦r❦❝♦♠♣✉t✐♥❣✳❝♦♠✴❝❧♦✉❞✲✐♥❢r❛str✉❝t✉r❡✴❛♠❛③♦♥✲❛♣✐s✲❛r❡✲❢✐♥❡✲✲❢♦r

✲❛♠❛③♦♥✴
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✺ ♦❢ ✸✽

AWS[14] ... they’re afraid of a world in which AWS becomes the primary way
that businesses buy infrastructure. It is to their advantage to have at least
one additional successful widely-adopted cloud management platform in the
market, and at least one service provider successfully competing strongly
against AWS. Yet AWS has established itself as a de facto standard for cloud
APIs and for the way that a service “should” be designed.” – Lydia Leong,
VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, 6 of April 2012[15]

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✼ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❋♦❧s♦♠ t♦ t❤❡ ●r✐③③❧② r❡❧❡❛s❡

Figure 7 shows the cooperation in the OpenStack Nova project from the ❋♦❧s♦♠
to the ●r✐③③❧② release (from September 27 th 2012 to April 4th 2013). As expected,
Citrix reduced its commitment to OpenStack, as we observe reduced cooperative
activity from Citrix developers. Canonical continued investing increasingly in the
development of OpenStack, interested in keeping its Linux Distribution Ubuntu as
the leading Linux distribution for OpenStack clouds [16] .
VMware, a Northern Californian firm with expertise in virtualization technolo-
gies, made substantial contributions (evidenced by the source-code commits) dur-
ing this between-releases period [17] . The acquisition of the networking virtualiza-
tion startup Nicira in July of 2012 reshaped the VMware cloud computing strategy.
As a sign of commitment to OpenStack, VMware and Canonical issued a joint
statement on their intentions to work together to improve the integration VMware
technologies with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution[18] .
Figure 8 captures the cooperation in the project in a more recent phase, from
the ●r✐③③❧② to the ❍❛✈❛♥❛ release (from April 4th 2013 to October 17th 2013). We
can see that VMware took its commitment to OpenStack seriously, as six new
developers engaged in developing with other OpenStack developers. Mirantis, in
yellow on the right of Figure 8, invested heavily in cooperative activities with
[14] AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. See ❤tt♣✿✴✴❛✇s✳❛♠❛③♦♥✳❝♦♠✴ for more details.
[15] ❤tt♣✿✴✴❜❧♦❣s✳❣❛rt♥❡r✳❝♦♠✴❧②❞✐❛❴❧❡♦♥❣✴✷✵✶✷✴✵✹✴✵✻✴❡❝♦s②st❡♠s✲✐♥✲❝♦♥❢❧✐❝t✲❛♠❛③♦♥✲✈s

✲✈♠✇❛r❡✲❛♥❞✲♦♣❡♥st❛❦✴
[16] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳♠❛r❦s❤✉tt❧❡✇♦rt❤✳❝♦♠✴❛r❝❤✐✈❡s✴✶✸✼✸
[17] ❤tt♣✿✴✴❜✐t❡r❣✐❛✳❝♦♠✴♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✲r❡❧❡❛s❡s✲r❡♣♦rts
[18] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✐r✳✈♠✇❛r❡✳❝♦♠✴r❡❧❡❛s❡❞❡t❛✐❧✳❝❢♠❄❘❡❧❡❛s❡■❉❂✼✺✻✼✷✾
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✻ ♦❢ ✸✽

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✽ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ●r✐③③❧② t♦ t❤❡ ❍❛✈❛♥❛ r❡❧❡❛s❡

IBM, Rackspace, and Red Hat. Mirantis counted on financial support from Dell
Ventures and Intel Capital (representing the interests of hardware manufacturers
betting on OpenStack[19] and additional investment by Ericsson, Red Hat, and SAP
Ventures[20] , turning it into one of the biggest code contributors to the OpenStack
software ecosystem in just a few months[17] .

developer
& a�liation

collaboration

❋✐❣✉r❡ ✾ ❋r♦♠ t❤❡ ❍❛✈❛♥❛ t♦ t❤❡ ■❝❡❤♦✉s❡ r❡❧❡❛s❡

Figure 9 captures the cooperation in the latest period studied, from the ❍❛✈❛♥❛
to the ■❝❡❤♦✉s❡ release (from October 17th 2013 to April 17th 2014).
By this time the role of NASA on OpenStack had diminished. The first develop-
ments of OpenStack were in the service of science, supporting NASA’s research
activities. NASA’s participation has been a selling point for advocates of Open-
Stack technologies. NASA lost much of its IT staff working on its Nebula cloud
computing project. Software developers and IT architects headed to startups and
high-tech giants within the OpenStack ecosystem. Moreover, a cost-driven IT re-
form led to disinvestment in OpenStack by NASA. Today, scientists at NASA
[19] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳♠✐r❛♥t✐s✳❝♦♠✴❝♦♠♣❛♥②✴♣r❡ss✲❝❡♥t❡r✴❝♦♠♣❛♥②✲♥❡✇s✴♠✐r❛♥t✐s✲r❡❝❡✐✈❡s✲✶✵

✲♠✐❧❧✐♦♥
[20] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳♠✐r❛♥t✐s✳❝♦♠✴❝♦♠♣❛♥②✴♣r❡ss✲❝❡♥t❡r✴❝♦♠♣❛♥②✲♥❡✇s✴♠✐r❛♥t✐s✲✇✐t❤

✲✐♥✈❡st♠❡♥t✴
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✼ ♦❢ ✸✽

depend on the Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure cloud computing infrastruc-
tures[21] . Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research (CERN) decided on an OpenStack based strategy in 2012. In
January of 2014, OpenStack was already running collision reconstructions at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)[22] .
By pure serendipity, we also explored the cooperation among competing ecosys-
tems (i.e., OpenStack vs. CloudStack). As pointed out before, Citrix, in a surprise
move, and citing the lack of OpenStack interoperability with Amazon cloud sys-
tems, acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011 and donated the overall code-base to
the Apache Foundation (a reputed non-profit corporation supporting open-source
software). “CloudStack’s application programming interface (API) provides com-
patibility with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the world’s
most popular public cloud” ... “(Citrix) hopes that EC2 customers will use their
CloudStack for their private clouds while using the EC2 APIs to integrate with
Amazon’s public cloud”[23] . This move raised conflict in the OpenStack commu-
nity. Citrix claimed to make peace with OpenStack on 21 April 2015 by announcing
that it had become a Corporate Sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation[24] .
From a research point of view, it was unclear during this period of conflict,
whether Citrix developers were contributing to OpenStack, CloudStack or both.
By mining both OpenStack and CloudStack repositories with SNA, we found out
that 10 developers contributed both to OpenStack and CloudStack. Six of these
developers were affiliated with Citrix. While Citrix’s contributions were recurrent,
the contributions of the other four were sporadic.
In the following Figure 10, we capture the role of Citrix in cooperation among
competing ecosystems, from the first open-source release of CloudStack to Citrix’s
official return to OpenStack (from November 6th 2012 to April 21th 2015). We rep-
resent the ecosystems as wireframe spheres, OpenStack on the left and CloudStack
on the right. Inside each ecosystem, we modeled the cooperative networks of de-
velopers that contribute to both ecosystems. As open-source ecosystems are not
black boxes, we were able to identify such developers. Citrix, as a firm, is repre-
sented as a cuboid. The ultra-thin cylinder connecting firms with developers maps
an “affiliation” relationship. Such visualization highlight that Citrix’s developers
were contributing to both OpenStack and CloudStack – in the open-source arena,
developers and firms can take part in competing ecosystems.

VI. Discussion
This research was conducted with the purpose of exploring cooperation among
competitors in the open-source arena. Our case revealed certain peculiarities
that call for the adaptation and expansion of the selected theory. Among other
[21] ❤tt♣✿✴✴❜❧♦❣s✳♥❛s❛✳❣♦✈✴◆❆❙❆✲❈■❖✲❇❧♦❣✴✷✵✶✷✴✵✻✴✵✾✴♣♦st❴✶✸✸✾✷✵✺✻✺✻✻✶✶✴
[22] ❤tt♣✿✴✴❤♦♠❡✳✇❡❜✳❝❡r♥✳❝❤✴❛❜♦✉t✴✉♣❞❛t❡s✴✷✵✶✹✴✵✶✴✐♠♣♦rt❛♥❝❡✲♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✲❝❡r♥
[23] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳③❞♥❡t✳❝♦♠✴❛rt✐❝❧❡✴♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦✲✈s✲❝❧♦✉❞st❛❝❦✲t❤❡✲❜❡❣✐♥♥✐♥❣✲♦❢✲t❤❡✲♦♣❡♥

✲s♦✉r❝❡✲❝❧♦✉❞✲✇❛rs✴
[24] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳❝✐tr✐①✳❝♦♠✴♥❡✇s✴❝✐tr✐①✲✐♥✲t❤❡✲♥❡✇s✴❛♣r✲✷✵✶✺✴❝✐tr✐①✲♠❛❦❡s✲♣❡❛❝❡✲✇✐t❤

✲♦♣❡♥st❛❝❦
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✶✾ ♦❢ ✸✽

the established literature addressing the competitive-cooperative mode of interor-

ganizational interactions where firms “cooperate with competitors to win” in a
self-serving game to ultimately gain the upper hand (Brandenburger and Nalebuff
2011; Chen and Miller 2015; Hamel et al. 1989).
As theoretically expected, competing firms cooperated within the OpenStack
socio-technical ecosystem seeking complementary external resources (Bengtsson
and Kock 2000; Tsai 2002), to mitigate risk (Gnyawali and Park 2011) and to learn
from others (Dussauge et al. 2000). Through cooperation, two companies can gain
access to each other’s unique resources or share the cost of developing new unique
resources (Bengtsson and Kock 2000). Within an open-source scenario, it is an
open (i.e., open for contributions from everyone) and networked community (i.e.,
relating firms and independent developers) that endows such external resources.
Even if the established competition theory did not originate from the open-source
context and rarely takes information systems into account in its conceptualizations,
its theoretical lenses proved to be very useful to make sense of why a network
of organizations would joint develop a cloud infrastructure for big data in an
open-source way.
However, our research also contrasts with the established competitive-cooperative
literature. First, by the inclusive and transparent nature of open-source projects –
most research addresses alliances that take the form of joint ventures, consortia,
or other arrangements where access is granted only to a few selected partners
(Bengtsson and Kock 2014; Gnyawali and Madhavan 2001). As in other open-
source projects, in OpenStack, everyone is welcome to contribute, and everyone
is allowed to copy, sell, and distribute outcomes from the project. In the Open-
Stack case, cooperation is wider, more heterogeneous, and more networked than
in much of the competitive-cooperative literature. The cooperation in OpenStack
included research institutes (e.g., CERN and NASA among many others), univer-
sities (e.g., Johns Hopkins University, and Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan among
many others), clients (e.g., Korea Telecom, and AT&T among many others deploy-
ing OpenStack), hardware suppliers (e.g., Intel and Cisco), competitors (e.g., IBM
and HP), and many independent third-party developers which are often hobbyists
without clear affiliation. Future research is needed to assess how the nature of
open-source software influences coopetitive relationships.
We conducted the analysis of relational interactions at the inter-individual, inter-
firm and inter-ecosystem level. As research addressing coopetition among ecosys-
tems remains scarce (Bengtsson and Kock 2014), we centered our discussion on
results that explore OpenStack in relation to its competing ecosystems (i.e., Cloud-
Stack and Amazon). We highlight the role of Citrix, a key actor in the ecosystem
which commitment to OpenStack evolved over time. As reported earlier, by 2010,
Citrix was the partner of Rackspace on the early days of OpenStack at NASA
(see Figure 2). On the follow-up of Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com on July 2011,
Citrix announced to ’abandon’ OpenStack in September 2012 citing the lack of
integration with the Amazon’s APIs. Citrix opted to focus instead on CloudStack
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✵ ♦❢ ✸✽

which codebase was open-sourced with its acquisition of Cloud.com (see Figures 5
to 8 for the progressively decreasing presence of developers affiliated with Citrix).
Citrix claimed later to make peace with OpenStack on 21 April 2015 by official
becoming a Corporate Sponsor of the OpenStack. By mining both OpenStack and
CloudStack repositories, we found out that six developers affiliated with Citrix
were actually recurrently contributing to both competing ecosystems during the
conflict period (see Figure 10 ).
From the perspective of a dyad of socio-technical ecosystems, we add to lit-
erature on portfolio of alliances (Anand and Khanna 2000; Duysters et al. 2012;
Hoffmann 2007; Lavie 2007; Lavie and Miller 2008; Lavie and Singh 2012; Wassmer
2010). As highlighted in Figure 10, we remarked that developers affiliated with
Citrix contributed concurrently to two competing open-source ecosystems (i.e.,
OpenStack and CloudStack). In fact, Citrix recurrently engaged in cooperation
with many other IT giants (e.g., with Amazon in setting cloud computing inter-
operability standards[25] , with Microsoft in ’PC’ virtualization technologies[26]
and with Google by joint-developing software powering the ’Chromebook lap-
top family’[27] among others). Such netting cooperative behavior of Citrix was
not exceptional, HP also contributed to both OpenStack and Eucalyptus (another
open-source cloud computing ecosystem). The observed mesh of alliances adds
relevance to research on how to manage a portfolio of alliances (Hoffmann 2005,0).
Anand and Khanna (2000) argued that firms should build an alliance manage-
ment capability while Hoffmann (2005) reported on the institutionalisation of
multi-alliance management.
Research on multi-alliance management addressed the effects of alliance portfo-
lio diversity. However, results on a diversity-performance relationship are rather
inconclusive with mixed results (Duysters et al. 2012). It is generally accepted that
redundant alliances can increase the reliability of the information and resources
that a focal company has access to and also reduce the dependence on a single
partner (Hoffmann 2005). However, the advantage of a portfolio of alliances is
not so much a matter of the portfolio’s size (i.e. number of alliances), but a mat-
ter of characteristics of the firms that a focal organization is connected to (Stuart
2000). Also, that the performance of a focal firm improves with the intensity of
competition among partners in its alliance portfolio (Lavie 2007). The evolution of
alliance portfolios is contingent on external constraints and opportunities (changes
in exogenous uncertainty), internal resources available, and strategic choices that
interact and drive the pace, pattern, and direction of the evolution of a firm’s
alliance portfolio (Hoffmann 2007). Inertial pressures tend to fixate the current
configuration of the alliance portfolio, whereas external stimuli in the form of
technological changes and shifts in strategy set new courses for alliances (Lavie
and Singh 2012).

[25] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳❝✐tr✐①✳❝♦♠✴❣❧♦❜❛❧✲♣❛rt♥❡rs✴❛♠❛③♦♥✲✇❡❜✲s❡r✈✐❝❡s✴♦✈❡r✈✐❡✇✳❤t♠❧
[26] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳❝✐tr✐①✳❝♦♠✴❣❧♦❜❛❧✲♣❛rt♥❡rs✴♠✐❝r♦s♦❢t✴♦✈❡r✈✐❡✇✳❤t♠❧
[27] ❤tt♣✿✴✴✇✇✇✳❝✐tr✐①✳❝♦♠✴♥❡✇s✴❛♥♥♦✉♥❝❡♠❡♥ts✴❛✉❣✲✷✵✶✹✴❝✐tr✐①✲❝♦❧❧❛❜♦r❛t✐♦♥✲✇✐t❤

✲❣♦♦❣❧❡
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✶ ♦❢ ✸✽

As information systems become increasingly networked and interconnected

(Ciborra et al. 2000; Henfridsson and Bygstad 2013) and research in multi-alliance
management remains scarce and inconclusive (Duysters et al. 2012; Lavie and
Singh 2012), there is an opportunity for information systems research to bridge
the literature in multi-alliance management and the literature in open-source
software. Given the trans-disciplinary nature of information systems (Carillo and
Bernard 2015; Galliers 2003) the IS field would be a perfect candidate for engaging
in a trans-disciplinary dialog and play a central role in producing a cumulative
body of high-quality research grasping both multi-alliance management (Rai and
Tang 2010) and open-source software (von Krogh and Spaeth 2007). As become
salient in our case by the pivotal role of Citrix across ecosystems, and as evidenced
by the sampled cases of open-coopetition (see Table 1), firms are often involved
in multiple and often competing open-source ecosystems. However, it remains
largely unknown how organizations manage their involvement across multiple
and often competing open-source ecosystems – a promising avenue for future
research.
A wide range of research focused on competition between ecosystems Apple
Safari vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Nokia N-Gage vs. Nintendo Gameboy, Mi-
crosoft Music Player vs. Apple iTunes, Google Android vs. Apple iPhone and
Google Talk vs. Skype as captured in a recent study by Eisenmann et al. (2011).
Researchers tend to stress on ecosystems as competing entities while ignoring
cooperation among them. By exploring both competition and cooperation among
ecosystems, we propose that development transparency and the weak intellectual
property rights, two well-known characteristics of open-source ecosystems, allow
an easier transfer of information and resources from one alliance to another (see
Hoffmann 2005). The scholars Parise and Casher (2003) pointed out that ”sharing
of information and knowledge across these alliances is rare“, but Hoffmann (2005)
pointed out synergies from transferring information and resources from one al-
liance to another. Future research is needed to access the impacts of development
transparency and weak intellectual property rights on spillovers, after all, open-
source initiatives are ”free spillovers“ (West and Gallagher 2006) or ”spillovers
without compensation“ (Gassmann et al. 2010).
By exploring the OpenStack ecosystem, following especially the evolution of Cit-
rix’s competitive-cooperative actions, we propose the following theoretical propo-
sition pinpointing a peculiarity of cooperating with competitors in an open-source
way:

Theoretical Proposition 1 – Within an R&D context where a focal firm is engaged in

multiple alliances, development transparency and weak intellectual property rights, allow
an easier transfer of information and resources between alliances.

At first sight, and while providing insight into why firms cooperate with com-
petitors in an open-source way, the advanced proposition makes a virtue of open-
coopetition (i.e., because it enables a focal firm to transfer information and re-
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✷ ♦❢ ✸✽

sources more easily between multiple alliances). However, living with paradox
implies that we shift expectations for rationality and linearity to accept paradoxes
as persistent and unsolvable puzzles (Smith and Lewis 2011). Consequently, we
caution against seeing the ”ease of transfer“ as a pure virtue. If in one hand, the
focal firm can benefit from an easier transfer of information and resources between
alliances, on the other hand, its competitors can also benefit from transparency
and weak intellectual rights (either entering in the same alliances or not). Even
within the context of multiple alliances, open-coopetition remains paradoxical
and difficult to explain. From one side, organizations can simultaneously bene-
fit from both coopetition (see Bengtsson and Kock 2000; Chen and Miller 2015;
Gulati et al. 2012) and open-source innovation (see Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald 2008;
Fitzgerald 2006; von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). But from the other side, there is
an increased risk of opportunistic behavior and unintended spillover effects (see
Nooteboom et al. 1997; Park and Russo 1996; Trott and Hartmann 2009).
Given the specific empirical background, where OpenStack challenges the domi-
nance of the cloud computing market by three large players (i.e., Amazon, Google,
and Microsoft), we add OpenStack as yet another paradoxical case of firms’ in-
vestment in open-source software to disrupt the leading positions of proprietary
software players (see West 2003; West and Gallagher 2006). However, as pointed
out in a recent review by Teixeira and Baiyere (2014), ”tables turned“, open-source
ecosystems should no longer be seen as the alternative to proprietary ecosystems
controlled by leading, and often monopolistic, players (e.g., Linux vs. Windows,
Mozilla vs. Internet Explorer, and R vs. SPSS among others). As outlined in Table 1,
several open-source ecosystems are now leading the market. For example, Google
Android and the Open Handset Alliance are leading the mobile platforms market
while traditional proprietary software players, such as Microsoft and Blackberry,
are currently struggling with residual sales (Teixeira and Baiyere 2014).
We remain far from a comprehensive understanding of ”why, how, and when
competitors cooperate in open-source ecosystems“. However, our research efforts
suggest that coopetition in an open-source way have its peculiarities - future
research is needed to assess the impact of the open-source movement to theory
addressing both cooperation and competition in inter-organizational settings.

VII. Conclusion
Managers deal with tensions in which opposing forces push or pull the organi-
zation in several ways at the same time (Lewis 2000; Nutt and Backoff 1993). In
industries characterized by high R&D costs and uncertainty (e.g., information tech-
nology sector), managers might have to deal with the competition versus cooperation
and open-source versus proprietary technology development paradoxes simultane-
ously. Both by visualizing the evolution of the social structure of OpenStack and
by scrutinizing complementary qualitative data, we propose that the development
transparency and weak intellectual property rights (i.e., characteristics of open-
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✸ ♦❢ ✸✽

source ecosystems) allow a focal firm to transfer information and resources more
easily between its multiple alliances.

Acknowledgments
Besides the three anonymous reviewers, we would like to thanks participants
from the 1st European Conference on Social Networks (INSNA EUSN 2014), the
10th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (ACM OpenSym 2014),
the 2nd IEEE International Conference Big Data (IEEE Big Data2014) and the
38th Information Systems Research Conference in Scandinavia (IRIS38) for early
feedback on our research efforts[28] . Special thanks to Gregorio Robles and Jesus
Gonzalez-Barahona that brought much expertise from the Mining Software Repos-
itories (MSR) field. Acknowledgments also for Lin Tingting, Devi Gnyawali, Rudy
Hirschheim, Natalia Levina, Sonali Shah and Annabelle Gawer for valuable ideas,
comments, and conversations. We thank also Arto Lanamäki for help revising the
manuscript. This research was partially funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e
a Tecnologia (grant SFRHBD615612009), Liikesivistysrahasto (grants 5-3076 and 8-
4499), Marcus Wallenberg Säätiö (grant “open-coopetition R&D management strat-
egy”), Academy of Finland (decision no. 295743) and the Turku Centre for Com-
puter Science (travel grant). We thank also the University of Turku, the EIT digital
and the University of Oulu for providing much of the needed research infrastruc-
ture. Finally, we would like to thank the R, Gource, Gephi, Tulip, Blender and
OpenStack open-source communities for developing cool and research-friendly
software.

Author details
1 Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Turun yliopisto, 20014 Turku,
Finland. 2 OASIS Research Group, University of Oulu, Oulun yliopisto, 90014
Oulu, Finland.

References
Adelman, C., Jenkins, D., and Kemmis, S. (1976). Re-thinking case study: notes
from the second cambridge conference. Cambridge journal of education,
6(3):139–150.
Adner, R. (2006). Match your innovation strategy to your innovation ecosystem.
Harvard business review, 84(4):98.
Adner, R. and Kapoor, R. (2010). Value creation in innovation ecosystems: How
the structure of technological interdependence affects firm performance in
new technology generations. Strategic management journal, 31(3):306–333.

[28] See Teixeira (2014a/2014b/2014c) as well as Teixeira and Mian (2015) for earlier related research.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✹ ♦❢ ✸✽

Afuah, A. (2000). How much do your co-opetitors’ capabilities matter in the face
of technological change? Strategic Management Journal, 21(3):397–404.
Ågerfalk, P. (2013). Embracing diversity through mixed methods research.
European Journal of Information Systems, 22(3):251–256.
Ågerfalk, P. and Fitzgerald, B. (2008). Outsourcing to an unknown workforce:
Exploring opensourcing as a global sourcing strategy. MIS quarterly,
32(2):385.
Ahuja, G. (2000). The duality of collaboration: Inducements and opportunities in
the formation of interfirm linkages. Strategic management journal,
21(3):317–343.
Aksulu, A. and Wade, M. (2010). A comprehensive review and synthesis of open
source research. Journal of the Association for Information Systems,
11(11):576–656.
Anand, B. N. and Khanna, T. (2000). Do firms learn to create value? the case of
alliances. Strategic management journal, 21(3):295–315.
Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact?
College & research libraries, 65(5):372–382.
Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., Lee, G.,
Patterson, D., Rabkin, A., Stoica, I., et al. (2010). A view of cloud computing.
Communications of the ACM, 53(4):50–58.
Ausubel, L. M. (1991). The failure of competition in the credit card market. The
American Economic Review, pages 50–81.
Awazu, Y. and Desouza, K. C. (2004). Open knowledge management: Lessons
from the open source revolution. Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, 55(11):1016–1019.
Baldi, F. (2012). Options in Alliances: Valuing Flexibility in Inter-firm Collaborations.
Springer Science & Business Media.
Bastian, M., Heymann, S., Jacomy, M., et al. (2009). Gephi: an open source
software for exploring and manipulating networks. In International AAAI
Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2009), volume 8, pages
361–362.
Bengtsson, M., Eriksson, J., and Wincent, J. (2010). Co-opetition dynamics – an
outline for further inquiry. Competitiveness Review: An International Business
Journal, 20(2):194–214.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✺ ♦❢ ✸✽

Bengtsson, M. and Kock, S. (2000). ” Coopetition” in Business Networks—to

Cooperate and Compete Simultaneously. Industrial marketing management,
29(5):411–426.
Bengtsson, M. and Kock, S. (2014). Coopetition—quo vadis? past
accomplishments and future challenges. Industrial Marketing Management,
43(2):180–188.
Bonaccorsi, A., Giannangeli, S., and Rossi, C. (2006). Entry strategies under
competing standards: Hybrid business models in the open source software
industry. Management Science, 52(7):1085–1098.
Bradner, J. (2011). Open-source cancer research | Talk Video | TED.com.
Brandenburger, A. and Nalebuff, B. (2011). Co-Opetition. Crown Publishing
Group.
Brandes, U., Robins, G., McCranie, A., and Wasserman, S. (2013). What is network
science? Network Science, 1(01):1–15.
Brandes, U. and Wagner, D. (2004). Analysis and visualization of social networks.
In Graph drawing software, pages 321–340. Springer, NYC, USA.
Briscoe, G. and Marinos, A. (2009). Digital ecosystems in the clouds: towards
community cloud computing. In Digital Ecosystems and Technologies, 2009.
DEST’09. 3rd IEEE International Conference on, pages 103–108. IEEE.
Büchel, B. (2003). Managing partner relations in joint ventures. MIT Sloan
management review, 44(4):91–95.
Butts, C. T. (2010). Tools for social network analysis. R package version, 2.
Cambrosio, A., Keating, P., and Mogoutov, A. (2004). Mapping collaborative work
and innovation in biomedicine: A computer-assisted analysis of antibody
reagent workshops. Social Studies of Science, 34(3):325–364.
Carillo, K. and Bernard, J.-G. (2015). How many penguins can hide under an,
umbrella? an examination of how lay conceptions conceal the contexts of
free/open source software. In Proceedings of the International Conference on
Information Systems (ICIS 2015). Association for Information Systems.
Casadesus-Masanell, R. and Yoffie, D. B. (2007). Wintel: Cooperation and conflict.
Management Science, 53(4):584–598.
Chan, S. H., Kensinger, J. W., Keown, A. J., and Martin, J. D. (1997). Do strategic
alliances create value? Journal of Financial Economics, 46(2):199–221.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✻ ♦❢ ✸✽

Chen, M.-J. (2008). Reconceptualizing the competition-cooperation relationship:

A transparadox perspective. Journal of Management Inquiry.
Chen, M.-J. and Miller, D. (2015). Reconceptualizing competitive dynamics: A
multidimensional framework. Strategic Management Journal, 36(5):758–775.
Chesbrough, H., Vanhaverbeke, W., and West, J. (2006). Open innovation:
Researching a new paradigm. Oxford university press.
Chow, R., Golle, P., Jakobsson, M., Shi, E., Staddon, J., Masuoka, R., and Molina, J.
(2009). Controlling data in the cloud: outsourcing computation without
outsourcing control. In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM workshop on Cloud
computing security, pages 85–90. ACM.
Christensen, C. M. and Rosenbloom, R. S. (1995). Explaining the attacker’s
advantage: Technological paradigms, organizational dynamics, and the
value network. Research Policy, 24(2):233 – 257.
Ciborra, C. U., Dahlbom, B., and Ljungberg, J. (2000). From Control to Drift: The
Dynamics of Corporate Information Infrastructures. Oxford University Press.
Clarysse, B., Wright, M., Bruneel, J., and Mahajan, A. (2014). Creating value in
ecosystems: Crossing the chasm between knowledge and business
ecosystems. Research Policy, 43(7):1164–1176.
Contractor, F. J. and Lorange, P. (1988). Why should firms cooperate? the strategy
and economics basis for cooperative ventures. Cooperative strategies in
international business, pages 3–30.
Contractor, F. J. and Lorange, P. (1992). Competition vs. cooperation: a
benefit/cost framework for choosing between fully-owned investments and
cooperative relationships. International Strategic Management: Challenges and
Opportunities, page 203.
Cravens, D. W., Piercy, N. F., and Shipp, S. H. (1996). New organizational forms
for competing in highly dynamic environments: the network paradigm.
British Journal of Management, 7(3):203–218.
Cross, R., Borgatti, S. P., and Parker, A. (2002). Making invisible work visible:
Using social network analysis to support strategic collaboration. California
Management Review, 44(2):25–46.
Crowston, K. and Howison, J. (2005). The social structure of free and open source
software development. First Monday, 10(2).
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✼ ♦❢ ✸✽

Crowston, K., Wei, K., Howison, J., and Wiggins, A. (2012). Free/libre
open-source software development: What we know and what we do not
know. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 44(2):7.
Davis, P. M., Lewenstein, B. V., Simon, D. H., Booth, J. G., Connolly, M. J., et al.
(2008). Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations:
randomised controlled trial. BMj, 337:a568.
DiMaggio, P. J. and Powell, W. W. (2000). The iron cage revisited-institutional
isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (reprinted
from the american sociological association vol 48, pg 147-160, 1983).
Advances in Strategic Management, 17:143–166.
Dreyfus, D., Iyer, B., Lee, C.-H., and Venkatraman, N. (2005). Dual networks of
knowledge flows: An empirical test of complementarity in the prepackaged
software industry. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information
Systems (ICIS 2003), page 21. Association for Information Systems.
Dubé, L. and Paré, G. (2003). Rigor in information systems positivist case
research: current practices, trends, and recommendations. MIS quarterly,
pages 597–636.
Dussauge, P., Garrette, B., and Mitchell, W. (2000). Learning from competing
partners: Outcomes and durations of scale and link alliances in europe,
north america and asia. Strategic management journal, 21(2):99–126.
Duysters, G., Heimeriks, K. H., Lokshin, B., Meijer, E., and Sabidussi, A. (2012).
Do firms learn to manage alliance portfolio diversity? the
diversity-performance relationship and the moderating effects of experience
and capability. European Management Review, 9(3):139–152.
Dyer, J. H. and Singh, H. (1998). The relational view: Cooperative strategy and
sources of interorganizational competitive advantage. Academy of
management review, 23(4):660–679.
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of
management review, 14(4):532–550.
Eisenmann, T., Parker, G., and Van Alstyne, M. (2011). Platform envelopment.
Strategic Management Journal, 32(12):1270–1285.
Elias, N. (1978). What is sociology? Columbia University Press, NYC, USA.
Elias, N. and Jephcott, E. (1982). The civilizing process, volume 2. Pantheon Books
New York.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✽ ♦❢ ✸✽

Enkel, E., Gassmann, O., and Chesbrough, H. (2009). Open r&d and open
innovation: exploring the phenomenon. R&d Management, 39(4):311–316.
European Commission (2001). Guidelines on the applicability of article 101 of the
treaty on the functioning of the european union to horizontal co-operation
agreements.
Federal Trade Commission (2000). Antitrust guidelines for collaborations among
competitors.
Feller, J. and Fitzgerald, B. (2002). Understanding open source software development.
Addison-Wesley London.
Fitzgerald, B. (2006). The transformation of open source software. MIS Quarterly,
pages 587–598.
Flynn, B. B., Sakakibara, S., Schroeder, R. G., Bates, K. A., and Flynn, E. J. (1990).
Empirical research methods in operations management. Journal of operations
management, 9(2):250–284.
Freeman, L. C. (2005). Graphic techniques for exploring social network data.
Models and methods in social network analysis, pages 248–269.
Fuller, M. B. and Porter, M. (1986). Coalitions and global strategy from.
Competition in global industries, pages 315–344.
Gacek, C. and Arief, B. (2004). The many meanings of open source. Software, IEEE,
21(1):34–40.
Galliers, R. D. (2003). Change as crisis or growth? toward a trans-disciplinary
view of information systems as a field of study: A response to benbasat and
zmud’s call for returning to the it artifact. Journal of the Association for
Information Systems, 4(1):13.
Garud, R. and Kumaraswamy, A. (1993). Changing competitive dynamics in
network industries: An exploration of sun microsystems’ open systems
strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 14(5):351–369.
Gassmann, O., Enkel, E., and Chesbrough, H. (2010). The future of open
innovation. R&d Management, 40(3):213–221.
Gawer, A. and Cusumano, M. A. (2002). Platform leadership: How Intel, Microsoft,
and Cisco drive industry innovation. Harvard Business School Press Boston.
Geipel, M. M. and Schweitzer, F. (2012). The link between dependency and
cochange: Empirical evidence. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,
38(6):1432–1444.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✷✾ ♦❢ ✸✽

Germonprez, M., Allen, J. P., Warner, B., Hill, J., and McClements, G. (2013). Open
source communities of competitors. interactions, 20(6):54–59.
Gfaller, G. R. (1993). Figuration’: The contribution of norbert elias to group
analysis and the contribution of group analysis to the social sciences. Group
analysis, 26(3):341–356.
Gibbert, M., Ruigrok, W., and Wicki, B. (2008). What passes as a rigorous case
study? Strategic Management Journal, 29(13):1465–1474.
Gilmore, T. N. and Krantz, J. (1991). Innovation in the public sector: dilemmas in
the use of ad hoc processes. Journal of Policy Analysis and management,
10(3):455–468.
Gilsing, V., Nooteboom, B., Vanhaverbeke, W., Duysters, G., and van den Oord, A.
(2008). Network embeddedness and the exploration of novel technologies:
Technological distance, betweenness centrality and density. Research Policy,
37(10):1717–1731.
Glänzel, W. and Schubert, A. (2005). Analysing scientific networks through
co-authorship. In Handbook of quantitative science and technology research,
pages 257–276. Springer, NYC, USA.
Gnyawali, D. R., Fan, W., and Penner, J. (2010). Competitive actions and
dynamics in the digital age: an empirical investigation of social networking
firms. Information Systems Research, 21(3):594–613.
Gnyawali, D. R. and Madhavan, R. (2001). Cooperative networks and competitive
dynamics: A structural embeddedness perspective. Academy of Management
review, 26(3):431–445.
Gnyawali, D. R. and Park, B.-J. R. (2009). Coopetition and Technological
Innovation in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: A Multilevel
Conceptual Model. Journal of Small Business Management, 47(3):308–330.
Gnyawali, D. R. and Park, B.-J. R. (2011). Co-opetition between giants:
Collaboration with competitors for technological innovation. Research Policy,
40(5):650–663.
Goldman, R. and Gabriel, R. P. (2005). Innovation happens elsewhere: Open source as
business strategy. Morgan Kaufmann.
Gomes-Casseres, B. (1994). Group vs. group: How alliance networks compete.
Harvard business review, 72(4):62–76.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✵ ♦❢ ✸✽

Gomes-Casseres, B. (1996). The alliance revolution: The new shape of business rivalry.
Harvard University Press.
Gore, W. (1985). The lattice organization–a philosophy of enterprise. Networking
Journal, pages 24–28.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American journal of sociology,
pages 1360–1380.
Granstrand, O. and Holgersson, M. (2013). Managing the intellectual property
disassembly problem. California Management Review, 55(4).
Greenwood, R. and Meyer, R. E. (2008). Influencing ideas a celebration of
dimaggio and powell (1983). Journal of Management Inquiry, 17(4):258–264.
Gudmundsson, S. V. and Lechner, C. (2006). Multilateral airline alliances:
Balancing strategic constraints and opportunities. Journal of Air Transport
Management, 12(3):153 – 158. Air Transport Research Society Conference,
Rio de Janeiro, July 2005.
Guiso, L., Sapienza, P., and Zingales, L. (2004). The role of social capital in
financial development. American Economic Review, pages 526–556.
Gulati, R. (1998). Alliances and networks. Strategic management journal,
19(4):293–317.
Gulati, R. and Gargiulo, M. (1999). Where do interorganizational networks come
from? 1. American journal of sociology, 104(5):1439–1493.
Gulati, R., Wohlgezogen, F., and Zhelyazkov, P. (2012). The two facets of
collaboration: Cooperation and coordination in strategic alliances. The
Academy of Management Annals, 6(1):531–583.
Gurstein, M. B. (2011). Open data: Empowering the empowered or effective data
use for everyone? First Monday, 16(2).
Hahn, J., Moon, J. Y., and Zhang, C. (2008). Emergence of new project teams from
open source software developer networks: Impact of prior collaboration ties.
Information Systems Research, 19(3):369–391.
Hamel, G., Doz, Y. L., and Prahalad, C. K. (1989). Collaborate with your
competitors and win. Harvard business review, 67(1):133–139.
Handcock, M. S., Hunter, D. R., Butts, C. T., Goodreau, S. M., and Morris, M.
(2003). statnet: Software tools for the Statistical Modeling of Network Data.
Seattle, WA.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✶ ♦❢ ✸✽

Harrigan, K. R. (1988). Joint ventures and competitive strategy. Strategic

Management Journal, 9(2):141–158.
Hastings, C. (1993). The new organization: Growing the culture of organizational
networking. McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Henfridsson, O. and Bygstad, B. (2013). The generative mechanisms of digital
infrastructure evolution. MIS Quarterly, 37(3):907–931.
Hoffmann, W. H. (2005). How to manage a portfolio of alliances. Long Range
Planning, 38(2):121–143.
Hoffmann, W. H. (2007). Strategies for managing a portfolio of alliances. Strategic
Management Journal, 28(8):827–856.
Howison, J., Wiggins, A., and Crowston, K. (2012). Validity issues in the use of
social network analysis with digital trace data. Journal of the Association for
Information Systems, 44(2):767–797.
Hung, S.-C., Liu, N.-C., and Chang, J.-B. (2003). The taxonomy and evolution of
technology strategies: A study of taiwan’s high-technology-based firms.
Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on, 50(2):219–227.
Iansiti, M. and Levien, R. (2004a). The keystone advantage: what the new dynamics of
business ecosystems mean for strategy, innovation, and sustainability. Harvard
Business Press, Boston, USA.
Iansiti, M. and Levien, R. (2004b). Strategy as ecology. Harvard business review,
82(3):68–81.
Ibarra, H., Kilduff, M., and Tsai, W. (2005). Zooming in and out: Connecting
individuals and collectivities at the frontiers of organizational network
research. Organization Science, 16(4):359–371.
Janssen, M., Charalabidis, Y., and Zuiderwijk, A. (2012). Benefits, adoption
barriers and myths of open data and open government. Information Systems
Management, 29(4):258–268.
Jarillo, J. C. (1988). On strategic networks. Strategic management journal, 9(1):31–41.
Kagdi, H., Collard, M. L., and Maletic, J. I. (2007). A survey and taxonomy of
approaches for mining software repositories in the context of software
evolution. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice,
19(2):77–131.
Kane, G. C., Alavi, M., Labianca, G., and Borgatti, S. P. (2014). What’s different
about social media networks? a framework and research agenda. MIS
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✷ ♦❢ ✸✽

Quarterly, 38(1):275–304.
Kogut, B. (1988). Joint ventures: Theoretical and empirical perspectives. Strategic
management journal, 9(4):319–332.
Lado, A. A., Boyd, N. G., and Hanlon, S. C. (1997). Competition, cooperation, and
the search for economic rents: a syncretic model. Academy of Management
Review, 22(1):110–141.
Lakhani, K. R. and von Hippel, E. (2003). How open source software works:“free”
user-to-user assistance. Research policy, 32(6):923–943.
Lavie, D. (2007). Alliance portfolios and firm performance: A study of value
creation and appropriation in the us software industry. Strategic
Management Journal, 28(12):1187–1212.
Lavie, D. and Miller, S. R. (2008). Alliance portfolio and firm performance.
Organization Science, 19(4):623–646.
Lavie, D. and Singh, H. (2012). The evolution of alliance portfolios: the case of
unisys. Industrial and Corporate Change, 21(3):763–809.
Lewis, M. W. (2000). Exploring paradox: Toward a more comprehensive guide.
Academy of Management review, 25(4):760–776.
Lewis, M. W. and Grimes, A. I. (1999). Metatriangulation: Building theory from
multiple paradigms. Academy of Management Review, 24(4):672–690.
Linåker, J., Rempel, P., Regnell, B., and Mäder, P. (2016). How firms adapt and
interact in open source ecosystems: Analyzing stakeholder influence and
collaboration patterns. In 22nd International Working Conference, Requirements
Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2016) Proceedings, pages
63–81. Springer International Publishing.
Loury, G. C. (1979). Market structure and innovation. The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, pages 395–410.
Lundvall, B.-A. (1992). User-producer relationships, national systems of
innovation and internationalisation. National systems of innovation: Towards a
theory of innovation and interactive learning, pages 45–67.
Maharaj, B. T., Wallace, J. W., Jensen, M. A., and Linde, L. P. (2008). A low-cost
open-hardware wideband multiple-input–multiple-output (mimo) wireless
channel sounder. Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on,
57(10):2283–2289.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✸ ♦❢ ✸✽

Mariti, P. and Smiley, R. H. (1983). Co-operative agreements and the organization

of industry. The Journal of industrial economics, pages 437–451.
Markus, M. L. and Agres, B. M. C. E. (2000). What makes a virtual organization
work? MIT Sloan Management Review, 42(1):13.
Martinez-Romo, J., Robles, G., Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M., and Ortuño-Perez, M.
(2008). Using social network analysis techniques to study collaboration
between a floss community and a company. In Open Source Development,
Communities and Quality, pages 171–186. Springer, NYC, USA.
McGaughey, S. L. (2002). Strategic interventions in intellectual asset flows. The
Academy of Management Review, 27(2):248–274.
McHugh, P., Merli, G., and Wheeler, W. A. (1995). Beyond business process
reengineering: towards the holonic enterprise. John Wiley & Son Ltd.
Moore, J. (1999). The Death of Competition - Leadership & Strategy in the Age of
Business Ecosystems. Wiley.
Morgan, L., Feller, J., and Finnegan, P. (2013). Exploring value networks:
theorising the creation and capture of value with open source software.
European journal of information systems, 22(5):569–588.
Newton, T. (2001). Organization: the relevance and the limitations of elias.
Organization, 8(3):467–495.
Nooteboom, B., Berger, H., and Noorderhaven, N. G. (1997). Effects of trust and
governance on relational risk. Academy of management Journal, 40(2):308–338.
Normann, R. and Ramirez, R. (1993). Designing interactive strategy. Harvard
business review, 71(4):65–77.
Normann, R. and Ramirez, R. (1994). Designing interactive strategy: From value
chain to value constellation, volume 1998. Wiley Chichester.
Nutt, P. C. and Backoff, R. W. (1993). Strategic issues as tensions. Journal of
management inquiry, 2(1):28–42.
Oinas-Kukkonen, H., Lyytinen, K., and Yoo, Y. (2010). Social networks and
information systems: ongoing and future research streams. Journal of the
Association for Information Systems, 11(2):3.
Open Medicine Institute (2015). Overview | Open Medicine Institute.
Pagani, M. (2013). Digital business strategy and value creation: Framing the
dynamic cycle of control points. MIS Quarterly, 37(2):617–632.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✹ ♦❢ ✸✽

Parise, S. and Casher, A. (2003). Alliance portfolios: Designing and managing

your network of business-partner relationships. The Academy of Management
Executive (1993-2005), pages 25–39.
Park, S. H. and Russo, M. V. (1996). When competition eclipses cooperation: An
event history analysis of joint venture failure. Management Science,
42(6):875–890.
Perens, B. (1999). The Open Source Definition. In Open sources: voices from the open
source revolution, page 280. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1 edition.
Perrow, C. (1972). Complex organizations. Scott, Foresman & Company Glenview,
IL.
Peters, T. and Waterman, R. (2004). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s
Best-Run Companies. Collins Business Essentials. HarperCollins.
Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G. R. (2003). The external control of organizations: A resource
dependence perspective. Stanford University Press.
Pigou, A. C. (2013). The economics of welfare. Palgrave Macmillan.
Poole, M. S. and Van de Ven, A. H. (1989). Using paradox to build management
and organization theories. Academy of management review, 14(4):562–578.
Porter, K., Whittington, K. B., and Powell, W. W. (2005). The institutional
embeddedness of high-tech regions: relational foundations of the Boston
biotechnology community. Clusters, networks, and innovation, 261:296.
Powell, W. W. and Smith-Doerr, L. (1994). Networks and economic life. The
handbook of economic sociology, 368:380.
R Core Team (2014). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R
Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
Raasch, C., Lee, V., Spaeth, S., and Herstatt, C. (2013). The rise and fall of
interdisciplinary research: The case of open source innovation. Research
policy, 42(5):1138–1151.
Rai, A. and Tang, X. (2010). Leveraging it capabilities and competitive process
capabilities for the management of interorganizational relationship
portfolios. Information Systems Research, 21(3):516–542.
Ramirez, R. (1999). Value co-production: intellectual origins and implications for
practice and research. Strategic Management Journal, 20(1):49–65.
Raymond, E. (1999). The cathedral and the bazaar. Knowledge, Technology & Policy,
12(3):23–49.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✺ ♦❢ ✸✽

Ritala, P. and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, P. (2013). Incremental and radical

innovation in coopetition—the role of absorptive capacity and
appropriability. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 30(1):154–169.
Rochet, J.-C. and Tirole, J. (2002). Cooperation among competitors: Some
economics of payment card associations. Rand Journal of economics, pages
549–570.
Rowley, T. J., Baum, J. A., Shipilov, A. V., Greve, H. R., and Rao, H. (2004).
Competing in groups. Managerial and decision economics, 25(6-7):453–471.
Rowley, T. J., Greve, H. R., Rao, H., Baum, J. A., and Shipilov, A. V. (2005). Time to
break up: Social and instrumental antecedents of firm exits from exchange
cliques. Academy of Management Journal, 48(3):499–520.
Rusko, R. (2014). Mapping the perspectives of coopetition and technology-based
strategic networks: A case of smartphones. Industrial Marketing Management,
43:801–812.
Schmalensee, R. (2002). Payment systems and interchange fees. The Journal of
Industrial Economics, 50(2):103–122.
Scott, J. (2012). Social network analysis. SAGE Publications Limited, London, UK.
Shanks, G. (2002). Guidelines for conducting positivist case study research in
information systems. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 10(1).
Sharma, S., Sugumaran, V., and Rajagopalan, B. (2002). A framework for creating
hybrid-open source software communities. Information Systems Journal,
12(1):7–25.
Smith, D. (2001). Norbert Elias and modern social theory. Sage.
Smith, W. K. and Lewis, M. W. (2011). Toward a theory of paradox: A dynamic
equilibrium model of organizing. Academy of Management Review,
36(2):381–403.
Söderberg, J. (2013). How open hardware drives digital fabrication tools such as
the 3d printer. Internet Policy Review, 2(2):np.
Stallman, R. (1985). The GNU manifesto. Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Stam, W. and Elfring, T. (2008). Entrepreneurial orientation and new venture
performance: The moderating role of intra-and extraindustry social capital.
Academy of Management Journal, 51(1):97–111.
Stuart, T. E. (2000). Interorganizational alliances and the performance of firms: A
study of growth and innovation rates in a high-technology industry.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✻ ♦❢ ✸✽

Strategic management journal, 21(8):791–811.

Swan, A. (2007). Open access and the progress of science. American Scientist,
95(3):197.
Sydow, J., Windeler, A., Schubert, C., and Möllering, G. (2012). Organizing r&d
consortia for path creation and extension: The case of semiconductor
manufacturing technologies. Organization Studies, 33(7):907–936.
Teece, D. J. (1992). Competition, cooperation, and innovation: Organizational
arrangements for regimes of rapid technological progress. Journal of
Economic Behavior & Organization, 18(1):1–25.
Teixeira, J. (2014a). Developing a cloud computing platform for big data: The
openstack Nova case. In Big Data (Big Data), 2014 IEEE International
Conference on, pages 67–69. IEEE.
Teixeira, J. (2014b). Open-coopetition in the cloud computing industry: The
openstack nova case. In Proceedings of the first European Social Networks
Conference, European Social Networks Conference. INSNA.
Teixeira, J. (2014c). Understanding coopetition in the open-source arena: The
cases of WebKit and OpenStack. In Proceedings of The International
Symposium on Open Collaboration, OpenSym 2014, pages 39:1–39:5. ACM.
Teixeira, J. and Baiyere, A. (2014). Crafting a systematic literature review on
open-source platforms. In Proceedings of Open Source Systems Conference
(OSS 2014), pages 113–122. Springer.
Teixeira, J. and Lin, T. (2014). Collaboration in the open-source arena: the webkit
case. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM conference on Computers and people
research, pages 121–129. ACM.
Teixeira, J. and Mian, S. Q. (2015). Open-coopetition in a cloud infrastructure for
big-data: Exploring the dichotomy of startups and giants in the
development of OpenStack. In 38th Information Systems Research Seminar in
Scandinavia (IRIS38).
Teixeira, J., Robles, G., and González-Barahona, J. M. (2015). Lessons learned from
applying social network analysis on an industrial Free/Libre/Open Source
Software ecosystem. Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 6(1):14.
Tichy, N. M., Tushman, M. L., and Fombrun, C. (1979). Social network analysis for
organizations. Academy of management review, 4(4):507–519.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✼ ♦❢ ✸✽

Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K., and Sørensen, C. (2010). Research commentary-digital

infrastructures: the missing is research agenda. Information systems research,
21(4):748–759.
Trier, M. (2008). Research note: Towards dynamic visualization for understanding
evolution of digital communication networks. Information Systems Research,
19(3):335–350.
Trist, E. (1977). A concept of organizational ecology. Australian journal of
management, 2(2):161–175.
Trott, P. and Hartmann, D. (2009). Why’open innovation’is old wine in new
bottles. International Journal of Innovation Management, 13(04):715–736.
Tsai, W. (2002). Social structure of “coopetition” within a multiunit organization:
Coordination, competition, and intraorganizational knowledge sharing.
Organization science, 13(2):179–190.
Uzzi, B. (1996). The sources and consequences of embeddedness for the economic
performance of organizations: The network effect. American Sociological
Review, pages 674–698.
Uzzi, B. (1997). Social structure and competition in interfirm networks: The
paradox of embeddedness. Administrative science quarterly, pages 35–67.
Venkatesh, V., Brown, S. A., and Bala, H. (2013). Bridging the
qualitative-quantitative divide: guidelines for conducting mixed methods
research in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 37(1):21–54.
von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing innovation. MIT press, Massachusetts, USA.
von Hippel, E. (2009). Democratizing innovation: the evolving phenomenon of
user innovation. International Journal of Innovation Science, 1(1):29–40.
von Hippel, E. and von Krogh, G. (2003). Open source software and the
“private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science.
Organization science, 14(2):209–223.
von Krogh, G. and Spaeth, S. (2007). The open source software phenomenon:
Characteristics that promote research. The Journal of Strategic Information
Systems, 16(3):236–253.
Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994). Social Network Analysis: Methods and
Applications, volume 8. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Wassmer, U. (2010). Alliance portfolios: A review and research agenda. Journal of
Management, 36(1):141–171.
❆♣♦❧✐♥❛r✐♦ ❚❡✐①❡✐r❛ ❡t ❛❧✳ P❛❣❡ ✸✽ ♦❢ ✸✽

West, J. (2003). How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source
platform strategies. Research policy, 32(7):1259–1285.
West, J. and Gallagher, S. (2006). Challenges of open innovation: the paradox of
firm investment in open-source software. R&d Management, 36(3):319–331.
Williamson, O. E. (1985). The economic intstitutions of capitalism. Simon and
Schuster.
Williamson, O. E. (1991). Comparative economic organization: The analysis of
discrete structural alternatives. Administrative science quarterly, pages
269–296.
Yami, S., Castaldo, S., Dagnino, B., and Roy, F. (2010). Coopetition: Winning
Strategies for the 21st Century. Edward Elgar.
Yin, R. K. (1997). Case study evaluations: A decade of progress? New Directions for
Evaluation, 1997(76):69–78.
Yin, R. K. (2006). Mixed methods research: Are the methods genuinely integrated
or merely parallel? Research in the Schools, 13(1).
Yin, R. K. (2011). Applications of case study research. Sage, London, UK.
Zaheer, A., Gulati, R., and Nohria, N. (2000). Strategic networks. Strategic
management journal, 21(3):203.
Zanetti, M., Scholtes, I., Tessone, C., and Schweitzer, F. (2013). Categorizing bugs
with social networks: A case study on four open source software
communities. In Software Engineering (ICSE), 2013 35th International
Conference on, pages 1032–1041.