Open source software developers’ perspectives on code reuse

Abstract

Literature on innovation management argues that knowledge reuse is an important lever for value creation, because by reusing existing knowledge in innovation processes firms can mitigate the costs of innovation (e.g. Zander & Kogut 1995; Langlois 1999; Majchrak et al. 2004). Knowledge reuse has historically been particularly relevant for innovation in the software industry and also many of the major advances in knowledge reuse research have been made in this space. Software reuse, as the software specific form of knowledge reuse, has long been identified as crucial to overcome the “software crisis” (Naur & Randell 1968) because it allows for more efficient and more effective development of software of higher quality (e.g. Krueger 1992; Kim & Stohr 1998).

This part of the dissertation has partly already been available in Sojer and Henkel (2010a).