The innovative Open alternative

Description:

Open source is a software development method driven by distributed peer review and transparency of process. The source code of open source software is part of the public domain and hence the software itself is free of charge. The open source community witnessed significant development during the early stages of internet development, with extensive focus on the Linux developing community and Linux-based applications and services. Such solutions are often embraced by Enterprise IT especially because of costs and quality.

Open innovation comes in conflict with open source development with respect to intellectual property and rightful ownership, because of the collaborative nature of intellectual knowledge creation. Hence, the two have a different approach to legal aspects such as copyrights and creative commons, but they are complementary to each other when looking at how open source software plays an important role in competition on the market and how software companies often embrace open source solutions and integrate them with their own products.

The concept of user innovation is strongly based on open source development and argues that innovation in the new economy will be driven by end-users and customers rather than suppliers, and communities such as the Linux open source developers are the ones that shape the future of products, such as in the above example the future of operating systems. For any product, in our case software, the open source community will eventually represent the driving force in development.

Whereas in a network economy value is created through collaboration and Web 2.0 tools, the current driving force intends to focus on the perspective of the Enterprise itself and its employees as customers of open source software. The Enterprise IT solutions will therefore be influenced by the user innovation present in open source software.