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, cooperate which each other in the development of open-source projects (e.g., Apple, Samsung, Google, Nokia) in the co-development of WebKit. More recently, open coopetition started also being used also to refer to strategic approaches where competing organizations collaborate on open innovation initiatives while maintaining their competitive market positions. 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.
By exploring coopetition in the particular context of open-source, Open-coopetition emphasizes transparency on the co-development of technological artifacts that become available to the public under an open-source license—allowing anyone to freely obtain, study, modify and redistribute them. Within open-coopetition, development transparency and sense of community are maximized; while the managerial control and IP enforcement are minimized. Open-coopetitive relationships are paradoxical as the core managerial concepts of property, contract and price play an outlier role. The openness characteristic of open-source projects also distinguishes open-coopetition from other forms of cooperative arrangements by its inclusiveness: Everybody can contribute. Users or other contributors do not need to hold a supplier contract or sign a legal intellectual property arrangement to contribute. Moreover, neither to be a member of a particular firm or affiliated with a particular joint venture or consortia to be able to contribute. In the words of Massimo Banzi, "You don't need anyone's permission to make something great". More recently open-coopetition is used to describe open-innovation among competitors more broadly with many cases out of the software industry. While some authors use open-coopetition to emphasize the production of open-source software among competitors, others use open-coopetition to emphasis open-innovation among competitors.
History
2008 In a large-scale study involving multiple European-based software intensive firms, the scholars Pär Ågerfalk and Brian Fitzgerald revealed a shift from "open-source as a community of individual developers to open-source as a community of commercial organizations, primarily small and medium-sized enterprises, operating as a symbiotic ecosystem in a spirit of coopetition". Even if they were exploring open-sourcing as "a novel and unconventional approach to global sourcing and coopetition", they captured the following quote that highlights that competition in the open-source arena is not as in business as usual.
"In a traditional market you don't call up your competitor and be like, oh, well tell me what your stuff does. But in open source you do." [Open Source Program Director, at IONA]
2012 Also in the academic world, and after following a software company based in Norway for over five years, and while theorizing on the concept of software ecosystem, the academic Geir K. Hanssen noted that the characteristic networks of a software ecosystem, open-source or proprietary ones, can embed competing organizations.
"Software ecosystems have a networked character. CSoft and its external environment constitute a network of customers and third party organizations. Even competitors may be considered a part of this network, although this aspect has not been studied in particular here."
In an opinion article entitled Open Source Coopetition Fueled by Linux Foundation Growth, the journalist and market analyst Jay Lyman highlights that "working with direct rivals may have been unthinkable 10 years ago, but Linux, open-source and organizations such as the Linux Foundation have highlighted how solving common problems and easing customer pain and friction in using and choosing different technologies can truly drive innovation and traction in the market." The term "open source coopetition" was employed to highlight the role of the Linux Foundation as a mediator of collaboration among rival firms.
2013 At the OpenStack summit in Hong Kong, the co-founder of Mirantis Boris Renski talked about his job on figuring out how to co-opete in the crowded OpenStack open-source community. In a 43-minute broadcast video, Boris Renski shed some light on OpenStack coopetition politics and shared a subjective view on strategies of individual players within the OpenStack community (e.g., Rackspace, Mirantis, IBM, HP and Red Hat among others). The Mirantis co-founder provided a rich description of an open-source community working in co-opetition. Along with this lines, the pioneering scholarly work of Germonprez et al. (2013) reported on how key business actors within the financial services industry that traditionally viewed open-source software with skepticism, tied up an open-source ‘community of competitors’. By taking the case of OpenMAMA, a Middleware Agnostic Messaging API used by some of the world's largest financial players, they show that corporate market rivals (e.g., J. P. Morgan, Bank of America, IBM and BMC) can coexist in open-source communities, and intentionally coordinate activities or mutual benefits in precise, market focused, and non-differentiating engagements. Their work pointed out that high-competitive capital-oriented industries do not epitomize the traditional and grassroots idea that open-source software was originally born from. Furthermore, they argued that open-source communities can be deliberately designed to include competing vendors and customers under neutral institutional structures (e.g., foundations and steering committees).
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