The main research interest in Open Source Software (OSS) has been in answering the questions of why individuals and organizations without economic compensation contribute to OSS projects and how these projects are organized. In this paper we instead focus on managerial decisions for acquisition of OSS and discuss potential barriers for widespread use of OSS. Based on existing literature and a small case study, we develop and discuss the hypothesis that a major barrier may be the “customer” organizations’ uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the relationships with OSS “vendors”. To develop viable models for these relationships is an important challenge, which we will deal with in a research project, of which this paper should be seen as a first step.

Lately we have seen a growing interest from both public and private organisations to adopt Open Source Software (OSS), not only for a few, specific applications but also on a more general level throughout the organisation. As a consequence, the organisations ’ decisions on adoption of OSS are becoming increasingly more important and complex. We present three perspectives organisations can employ in their decisions: seeing OSS acquisition as a business case, as COTS acquisition, and as architectural change within a governance framework. We present case studies of decisions on OSS adoption, and categorise the decision criteria we have found. Our results indicate that for large-scale adoption of OSS, focus will be on architectural considerations: enterprise-wide architectures will at first be a barrier, but in the long term OSS’s support of open standards can be a major enabler for OSS adoption. In contrast, in smaller organisations and in small-scale adoption of OSS, the cheap price of OSS is a major enabler, as it provides a good opportunity for experiments and short-term economic benefits. For small organisations these experiments can lead to development of a common IT-architecture, and in larger organisations OSS can be adopted in niche-areas, without significantly