OSS Ideology plays a critical role in Commercial OSS Adoption and Innovation. As Snapfix continues to adopt OSS technologies and transition to providing a subset of our services as open-source, it will be important to maintain our policy of using OSS culture and ideology. The remaining aspects of our stack that is not based on OSS will eventially be phased out as we continue our transition from monolithic to micro service based architectures. Mainly in our expanding reliance on containerization as a means of providing open APIs.

The literature provides a comprehensive overview for firms considering OSS adoption. The exploration of Digital Folds (Shaikh and Vaast, 20161) and Ideology Misfit (Daniel et al., 20182) provide a nuanced view of OSS Ideological concepts and their effect on innovation and employee commitment to the firm.

A firms staff will be neutral or resistant to OSS adoption unless they have had prior exposure to OSS. The literature reveals several motivations for firms to induct their employees into the norms, beliefs and practices of OSS development. It is recommended that firms encourage their staff to contribute to an existing OSS project (even one unrelated to the firms interests) in order to ease later commercial adoption. Professional Software Ethics are increasingly been driven by OSS practice and Ideology. Should this trend continue, software firms legitimacy will be challenged if their employees lack exposure to OSS.

Reverting to opaque processes may accelerate innovation in some edge cases but with a risk of signalling to the OSS community that the firm does not embrace OSS Ideology.

Next: Commercial Open Source Revenue


  1. Shaikh, M., Vaast, E., 2016. Folding and Unfolding: Balancing Openness and Transparency in Open Source Communities. Inf. Syst. Res. 27, 813–833. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2016.0646 ↩︎

  2. Daniel, S.L., Maruping, L.M., Cataldo, M., Herbsleb, J., 2018. The Impact of Ideology Misfit on Open Source Software Communities and Companies. MIS Q. 42, 1069–1096. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2018/14242 ↩︎