OSS adoption : Organizational investment in internal human capital

Adopting Open Source Software (OSS) that has an enterprise-wide implication could be complex and requires an organization to possess adequate level of internal human capital before doing so. In this study, we propose and validate two antecedents of organizational investment in internal human capital in the context of OSS adoption. They are (1) firm-specificity of OSS human capital, which denotes the extent to which the internal OSS human capital is strongly tied to the organization and cannot be equally well applied in other organizations, and (2) learning-related scale, which reflects the extent to which the organizational cost of learning OSS can be spread by applying the knowledge gained to other projects and business functions within the organization. Survey data collected from 114 senior Information Technology (IT) managers and professionals indicates that these two factors are positively associated with the investment in cultivating internal OSS human capital.