Issues and Challenges of Free and Open Source Software Adoption in the Philippines

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a software philosophy that provides the user liberty to access, examine, and modify its source codes, use it and deploy it free of charge. This concept of FOSS manifests many benefits for organizations such as open innovation, competitive advantage, collaboration, and other strategic advantages, thus allowing organizations to custom fit software to their needs. However, these perceived benefits could be maximized if the issues and challenges faced by organizations adopting FOSS will be elucidated.

The main thrust of this study is to conduct a baseline survey to aide Strategic IT planning and policy-making by determining the awareness, proficiency, the issues and challenges in using, managing and implementing FOSS in supporting organizational processes by IT managers and personnel in the business/industry, academic, and government sectors.

The study used descriptive, inferential and exploratory research methods wherein qualified respondents were chosen using the combination of purposive and snowball sampling techniques. The respondents were surveyed using a questionnaire.

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The results of the study showed that IT managers and personnel were totally aware of FOSS concepts and are highly proficient in the use of FOSS applications. Furthermore, it was revealed that qualification and selection of FOSS; Procurement of FOSS, human factors; legal issues; usability; and software development and support are the main issues and challenges.

Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is a software development philosophy where the users are granted liberty to scrutinize, alter, customize or redistribute the source code of any software project under free software licenses.

Thus open source concerns the code the software is made of. It creates value for citizens, public and private sectors when applied intelligently in the proper areas (The National IT and Telecom Agency [NITTA] of Denmark, 2009).This open paradigm to software development has become popular among developers and has been adopted by many corporations. FOSS are the core of most web browsers, operating systems, servers, and databases (Ghosh et al., 2006).

According Zacchiroli (2015), a program can be considered free and open source if it provides users the following four freedoms: “Freedom #0, to run the program, for any purpose; Freedom #1, to study how the program works, and change it; Freedom #2, to redistribute copies; and Freedom #3, to improve the program, and release improvements.”

Among the transformational benefits cited by open source users are increased innovation, time savings, and lower cost of ownership. FOSS is software that’s free to license and readily accessible. It is mostly supported by vast community of collaborators enabling developers the repositories of modules of reusable code that can perform a desired programming function. Code libraries can be easily integrated with the programming environment and then easily include codes with own projects. With these perceived competitive advantages, enterprises are beginning to integrate their open source applications with the cloud (Vaughn-Nichols, 2015).

Furthermore, Vaughn-Nichols (2015) stated that one recent survey reported that 78 percent of its respondents run some or all of their operations on open source software, and 66 percent said that their companies create software for customers built on open source. Similarly, the same respondents prefer FOSS as their default development platform overt their proprietary counterpart. One survey conducted to CIOs perceive that cloud computing, big data, operating systems, and the Internet of Things will rely on FOSS in the next 2–3 years (Colyer, 2016).

FOSS propels the firm’s competitive advantage with open innovation (Von Hippel & Von Krogh, 2003) as it enables community and inter-organizational collaboration (Christensen & Rosenbloom, 1995). In fact, freedom to access source codes encourages of technology innovation to the firm’s requirements (Cassell, 2008; Mosoval et al., 2006). Both public and private organizations are critical not only with FOSS’ perceived benefits but also with the issues and challenges it introduces.