The Value Proposition for Participating in Free Libre Open Works
Free/libre/open works involve multi-organizational joint or collective authorship and distribution of re-usable digital data, information or knowledge works, which the parties each consider to be helpful towards achieving their business goals. They put in place arrangements across organizational boundaries to collectively self-supply specific solutions that meet their respective goals.
Each cooperating individual or team within the project community allocates resources for collective use when the benefits, risk management and/or cost outcomes of this collaboration are more attractive than what they could achieve via a solo implementation, or through any other available option. No individual or team would have a business incentive to participate in the creation or maintenance of a free/libre/open work unless the outcome were more:
- Cost effective: If equivalent outcomes can be obtained by some other route that takes less time and money, then the other option should be engaged.
or - Cost efficient: Net outcome improvements from participation should be justifiable in view of relative amount of time and money require for participation.
Many managers have reported significant benefits through collective self-provisioning through open source methods:
• "Saved us $120K this year, but several hundred thousand dollars in time savings";
• "We have seen a 75% cost savings, and we have significantly advanced our timelines";
• "What would have taken us two years to put into place, we accomplished in three weeks";
• "It is unbelievably cost effective by as much as a factor of 10".
These results are consistent with a view of ethical business as an optimal form of rationality. (See pg 12 in: Economic rationality and ethical behavior http://ideas.repec.org/p/upf/upfgen/584.html ) The set of economic purposes served, and the value proposition for organizations, is to enable participating projects, services and their partners to augment benefits, better manage risk, and reduce costs through collaborative provisioning and inter-organizational learning, across boundaries in cooperation with other teams and organizations.
Augment Benefits
- Optimize the pace of innovation through inter-organizational collaboration and learning:
- International
- Cross-sector/Cross-departmental
- Cross-industry
- Leverage existing intellectual and informatics works that have already been paid for
- Foster an agile and competitive environment by reducing barriers to entry
- Strengthen in-house and/or independent security, management and financial control
- Diversify and decentralize opportunities for employment and business
- Customization for niche requirements
- Opportunities for small/medium enterprise outside major cities
- Engage internal and external expertise
- Different core competencies
- Quality assurance community
- Implementation community
Manage Risk
- Distribute risk amongst multiple participant-tenants
- Advance and protect the "knowledge commons"
- Outlast team/organization (sustainability)
- Learn from peer review feedback
- Praise and/or criticism
- Confirmation/rejection of assumptions
- Personnel retention & succession management
Reduce Costs
- Reuse components (own & others)
- Redirect creativity, effort and spending out of redundancy and idiosyncrasy
- Externalize some costs of creation/evolution
- Retain the freedom to stand still (no forced obsolescence/upgrades)
- Reduce time and money required for legal reviews
- Reduce or eliminate the requirement for “non-disclosure agreements”
- Simplify copyright license management
- Rely upon general purpose re-usable licenses
- Reduce start-up and delivery times
- Engage international standards by default
- Align to a more elegant modular architecture
- Allow for more agile systems development
- Retain freedom to adapt to requirements