Dual allegiance and knowledge sharing in Open Source software firms

Abstract

Employees of commercial software firms who participate in open source software projects are found to be allegiant to both their company and the open source community. In this paper we examine how these employees' dual allegiance influences their knowledge sharing behaviour. We adopt Husted and Michailova's model on dual allegiance and knowledge sharing in inter-firm R&D collaborations to the context of open source software firms. We argue that the type of allegiance the individual holds towards their employing firm and the open source community has a strong influence of how they share knowledge with other community members. We use the examples of two open source software firms in New Zealand to ground the empirical inspiration of our paper and to illustrate our key ideas and arguments. We discuss the knowledge governance challenges imposed by employees' dual allegiance and how managers of open source software firms can balance the demands of the open source community and the interests of the clients.