Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Today, unpredicted and hidden expenses of software are known as “software crisis”. Software maintenance cost is considered as the main component of software engineering costs and according to the studies, between 50 to 90 percent of software projects expenses are spent on this cost (de Vasconcelos, Kimble, Carreteiro, & Rocha, 2017; Seifzadeh, Abolhassani, & Moshkenani, 2013). Therefore, software maintenance and software systems promotion issues are of great importance. As a solution, numerous studies have been conducted on the subject of software migration from migration to service-oriented architectures (Athanasopoulos, 2017; Fuhr, Horn, Riediger, & Winter, 2013) to migration to cloud (Bisbal et al., 1997; Botto-Tobar, Ramirez-Anormaliza, Cevallos-Torres, & Cevallos-Ayon, 2017; Fowley, Elango, Magar, & Pahl, 2017; Gholami, Daneshgar, Beydoun, & Rabhi, 2017; Gholami, Daneshgar, Low, & Beydoun, 2016; Kesserwan, Dssouli, & Bentahar, 2018; Mohagheghi & Sæther, 2011). One of the types of migration is the migration to open source software.
The monopoly and information dominance of close source software providers have led countries to follow the approach of using open source software only in private sectors (Pouresmaiel, 2014). Before any measure can be taken in order to migrate software systems, that migration process should be justified and adopted by target organization. While there are extensive studies in the field of migration adoption (Chau & Tam, 1997; Hauge, Cruzes, Conradi, Velle, & Skarpenes, 2010; Jokonya, 2015; López et al., 2016; Mindel, Mui, & Verma, 2007; Murphy & Cox, 2016; Silic & Back, 2017; Tapia, López, Ayala, & Annosi, 2015; van Loon & Toshkov, 2015), the current study assumes that the migration process is adopted by the organization; and therefore, it focuses on the actions the organization should perform after that decision. Recently, the replacement of proprietary software with open source one has been increasing in government agencies and software companies (Sarma, 2016). In Iran, the government has officially begun the development and promotion of open source software since 2000. After some cyber threats, the government has identified the migration to native and open source software as one of the ways to secure computer systems (Pouresmaiel, 2014). Open source software is introduced as a method of software development, so that by encouraging others to collaborate on software development, the software usage can be maximized (Lee, Kim, & Gupta, 2009; Subramaniam, Sen, & Nelson, 2009).