A review of factors influencing open source software adoption by users in IT profession

Abstract or Summary

Globally, the acceptability of Open Source Software (OSS) among Information Technology (IT) professionals is evolving. There are many previous studies on developer’s contribution to OSS project implementation and organizational acceptance, but there is astonishingly little study on OSS adoption by users, regardless of the social, practical, and infrastructure-related impacts of OSS adoption and the acceptance of these OSS products did not gain much awareness in the developing countries like India. Therefore, the study's major goal is to investigate the benefits of OSS over other types of software for Indian IT sector professionals, assess the present state of adoption, and determine the factors that influencing the OSS user acceptance/adoption. The current study aims to determine the dependent and independent variables, as well as the factors that influence individual attitudes about OSS adoption and advantages and disadvantages of OSS over another type of software such as Proprietary Software(PS). As a result, the proposed study explores the impact of OSS features and characteristics on OSS acceptability using a theoretical model. The “Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT)” framework is used to construct and present the infrastructure aspects of accepting OSS systems. This study provides a literature review on software characteristics on OSS adoption. Using a quantitative design, a questionnaire with 28 questions was distributed to over-18-year-old IT professionals in India. As per the data analysis results, this survey received 403 valid responses in that 85.6% of respondents were familiar with open source. It is found that 0.966 for Cronbach's Alpha measured across 16 questionnaires indicates that the framework used is a good fit for reliability testing. Univariate Analysis - Chi-square indicates that software quality, software security, cost, performance expectation, employee effort expectation, and social influence are significant factors affecting behavioral intentions to adopt OSS with a p-value of = 0.000 and less than significance level value 0.005. According to the linear regression results, Security significantly affected performance expectancy (with β=0.6515 and P <0.001 and t-value=16.942 and 45.9% variance due to IT Specialty ), performance expectation significantly influenced behavioral intentions (with β=0.206 and P <0.001 and t-value=4.014 and 55.1% variance due to IT Specialty) and Effort expectancy had a significant impact on behavioral intentions(with β=0.2585 and P <0.001 and t-value=4.953 and 53.1% variance due to IT Specialty). In the descriptive analysis results, the results showed that OSS quality is good and is more secure when compared to PS with results of 56.71% and 43.6%, respectively. 31.43% of respondents believe that OSS has improved their performance, OSS is easy to use according to 30.7% of participants, 30% people claimed that OSS is less expensive to maintain than PS, 31.7% respondents were motivated by organizational influence, and 28.4% answered that the community provides support when needed. According to 235 IT users, the OSS has better characteristics when compared to PS. Although most respondents replied OSS is better than PS in the survey, due to the low response rate, it is imperative to educate users about the advantages of OSS in developing countries such as India and to maximize usage and acceptance. Results showed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, software security, software quality, and software cost and maintenance are important indicators in the acceptance and adoption of OSS. Further research can be conducted in wider Geo-graphical locations to observe the acceptance and adoptability of OSS.