Networks, social influence, and the choice among competing innovations: Insights from open source software licenses

摘要

One of the emerging trends in IT adoption research is the heterogeneous diffusion model which tries to model the social influence of prior adopters. The social influence is discussed in terms of a 1. Potential adopter to social information about the innovation, 2. The infectiousness of information about the innovation from prior adopters, and 3. The social proximity between prior and potential adopters. Based on this proposition, the present research tries to understand the extent to which prior adopters socially influence potential adopters depends on the number and characteristics of prior adopters as sources of information about an innovation, characteristics of potential adopters as recipients and interpreters of this information, and the social proximity between them. The empirical setting is attempted by studying the adoption of particular types of open source software (OSS) licenses by new open source projects. Thus the paper tries to adapt and extend the heterogeneous diffusion model and investigate each dimension - infectiousness, social proximity, and susceptibility - and derive predictions related to each dimension. The source of influence on a potential adopter's susceptibility to the social influence of prior adopters is explained by using the experiences of organizational members who have worked with particular innovations in other organizations. The model is tested on factors shown to affect OSS license choice using a sample of 5,307 OSS projects hosted at SourceForge. In this particular research context, the adoption of specific categories of OSS licenses OSS is focused especially the unrestrictive (neither clause is present), restrictive (only the copy left clause is present), and highly restrictive (both clauses are present).