Abstract:
Open Source Software (OSS) has become the subject of much commercial interest of late. Certainly, OSS seems
to hold much promise in addressing the core issues of the software crisis, namely that of software taking too
long to develop, exceeding its budget, and not working very well. Indeed, there have been several examples of
significant OSS success stories—the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the BIND domain name
resolution utility, to name but a few. However, little by way of rigorous academic research on OSS has been
conducted to date. In this study, a framework was derived from two previous frameworks which have been very
influential in the IS field, namely that of Zachman’s IS architecture (ISA) and Checkland’s CATWOE
framework from Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). The resulting framework is used to analyze the OSS
approach in detail. The potential future of OSS research is also discussed.
