Willingness to cooperate within the Open Source Software domain

Open Source Software (OSS) is an increasingly hot topic in the business domain. One of the key benefits mentioned is the unlimited access to the source code, which enables large communities to continuously improve a software application and prevents vendor lock-in. How attractive these benefits may be, the market for OSS however remains limited. In the Netherlands research consisting of 7 interviews and a survey among 206 Open Source Software Service providers (with a 34% response rate) was done to determine whether service providers wanted to cooperate in an Association that will set quality levels and guarantees to its members and their customers. © 2008 by International Federation for Information Processing.