page_title: Open coopetition
section_title: 2016
hierarchical_section_title: Open coopetition / History / 2016
caption_attribution_description: English: Network analysis 3D visualization illustrates that Citrix (a firm) contributed both two OpenStack and CloudStack (two competing software ecosystems). Moreover, Citrix developers collaborated in software development with developers from VMware, IBM, and Rackspace (all competing with each other).
context_page_description: In R&D management and systems development, open coopetition or open-coopetition is a neologism to describe cooperation among competitors in the open-source arena. The term was first coined by the scholars Jose Teixeira and Tingting Lin to describe how rival firms that, while competing with similar products in the same markets, collaborate which each other in the development of open-source projects.
  Open-coopetition is a compound-word term bridging coopetition and open-source. Coopetition refers to a paradoxical relationship between two or more actors simultaneously involved in cooperative and competitive interactions; and open-source both as a development method that emphasizes transparency and collaboration, and as a "private-collective" innovation model with features both from the private investment and collective action — firms contribute towards the creation of public goods while giving up associated intellectual property rights such patents, copyright, licenses, or trade secrets.
context_section_description: A related study by Linåker et al. (2016) analyzed the Apache Hadoop ecosystem in a quantitative longitudinal case study to investigate changing stakeholder influence and collaboration patterns. They found that the collaborative network had a quite stable number of network components (i.e., number of sub-communities within the community) with many unconnected stakeholders. Furthermore, such components were dominated by a core set of stakeholders that engaged in most of the collaborative relationships. As in OpenStack, there was much cooperation among competing and non-competing actors within the Apache Hadoop ecosystem—or in other words, firms with competing business models collaborate as openly as non-rivaling firms. Finally, they also 
  argued that the openness of software ecosystems decreases the distance to competitors within the same ecosystem, it becomes possible and important to track what the competitors do within. Knowing about their existing collaborations, contributions, and interests in specific features offer valuable information about the competitors’ strategies and tactics.
  In a study addressing coopetition in the cloud computing industry, Teixeira et al. analyzed not only coopetition among individuals and organizations but also among cohesive inter-organizational networks. Relationships among individuals were modeled and visualized in 2D longitudinal visualizations and relationships among inter-organizational networks (e.g., alliances, consortium or ecosystem) were modeled and visualized in 3D longitudinal visualizations. The author added evidence to prior research suggesting that competition is a multi-level phenomenon that is influenced by individual-level, organizational-level, and network-level factors.
  By noting that many firms engaging into open-coopetition actively manage multiple portfolios of alliances in the software industry (i.e., many strategically contribute to multiple open-source software ecosystems) and by analyzing the co-evolution of OpenStack and the CloudStack cloud computing platforms,  the same authors propose that development transparency and the weak intellectual property rights, two well-known characteristics of open-source ecosystems, allow an easier transfer of information and resources from one alliance to another.  Even if openness enables a focal firm to transfer information and resources more easily between multiple alliances, such  'ease of transfer'  should not be seen as a source of competitive advantage as competitors can do the same.
caption: Coopetition among a dyad of software ecosystems.
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