OpenEC/B: Electronic Commerce and Free/Open Source Software Development Walt Scacchi Institute for Software Research Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 USA http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi ABSTRACT This report investigates Open Source E-Commerce or E-Business capabilities. This entails a case study within one firm that has undertaken an organizational initiative to develop, deploy, use, and support free/open source software systems for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), E-Commerce (EC) or E-Business (EB) services. The objective is to identify and characterize the resource-based software product development capabilities that lie at the center of the initiative. 1. INTRODUCTION This paper presents and analyzes a case study that examines how a firm can support an E-Commerce or E-Business initiative that builds from free/open source software (FOSS) product development capabilities. Such capabilities may focus, for example, on back office activities associated with corporate financial operations, or on front office activities associated with customer relationship management. Alternatively, the focus may be directed as an organizational system where wireless, mobile, or p2p capabilities are sought. The study employs a resource-based view of the organizational system involved in developing an open source EC/EB software products or application systems. The analysis and results of the case study focus attention to data that characterizes the organization's resource-based product development capabilities. This case study examines the GNUenterprise.org project. This study serves as a point of departure to explicate the concept of Open EC/B introduced in this paper. Open EC/B results from combining OSSD concepts, techniques, and tools with those for EC and EB. 2. Case Study: GNUenterprise.org and the development of FOSS ERP software GNUenterprise.org is an international virtual organization for software development [Crowston and Scozzi 2002, Noll and Scacchi 1999] based in the U.S. and Europe that is developing a free, open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and related E-Business capabilities. As such, these conditions make this study unique in comparison to previous case studies of EC or EB initiatives, which generally assume the presence of a centralized administrative authority and locus of resource control common in most large firms. Nonetheless, we still need a better understanding of what resource-based capabilities are brought to bear on the development and deployment of EB and ERP software by GNUenterprise.org. Subsequently, what follows is a description of key resources being employed throughout GNUenterprise.org to develop and support the evolution of the GNUe software modules. The following sections present an interpretive analysis of the case study, as is appropriate for the kinds of data and descriptions that have been presented and in related studies [cf. Scacchi 2001, 2002, Skok and Legge 2002]. One category of challenges to Open EC/B that is apparent are those denoting resource-based capabilities. 3. Resources and Capabilities for Open EC/B In this section, the two different contexts in which Plone has been reused are described. Firstly, it has formed the basis for the collaboration and communication infrastructure for the EU FP6 Coordination Action for Libre Software Engineering for Open Development Platforms for Software and Services (“CALIBRE” 1 ) project. Secondly, based on this earlier use, it has been adapted as the content management system for the newly-formed British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. These two contexts differ greatly in their requirements; however the flexibility of Plone has allowed the same system to be adapted to meet the requirements in both cases. What kinds of resources or business capabilities are needed to help make Open EC/B efforts more likely to succeed? Based on what was observed in the GNUenterprise.org case study, the following kinds of resources enable the development of both 1 http://calibre.ie/ Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Open Source Application Spaces: Fifth Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering (5-WOSSE) May 17, 2005, St Louis, MO, USA. Copyright 2005 ACM 1-59593-127-9 … $5.00. 1