Utilization and development contribution of open source software in Japanese IT companies: an exploratory study of the effect on business growth (2nd report based on 2014 survey)

The usage of Open Source Software (OSS) has been extended in a wide range of business fields not only IT industries. Behind this current situation, there are tremendous inputs by the volunteer engineers in the development communities. In this series of studies, we have conducted questionnaire survey to Japanese IT companies in 2012 and 2013, and then analyzed the relation between OSS utilization and development contribution, and how these affect the business growth. Our study revealed that Japanese IT companies are rather free riders of OSS, the volume of development contributions are far less than that of utilization. From our previous studies, it was anticipated that some OSS-related factors were affecting the business growth; however, clear evidence has not been found. In autumn 2014, we conducted the questionnaire survey for the third time and this paper presents the survey results as the second report of the continued research. We constructed the simplified Logistic Model to investigate the influential factors on business growth. However, no clear evidence was found as the same as the previous study. In summary, we conclude that there are some form of relationships between OSS utilization and development contribution, but these are not the determinant factors on the business growth in the Japanese IT companies at present.