Master Thesis - Strengths & Weaknesses of FLOSS ERP A study about the perception of its adopters

Abstract
The benefits and drawbacks of OSS have been widely researched and discussed throughout the literature. This has resulted in a broad list of motives debating what aspects of such software are positive or negative in contrast to proprietary software. However, with past research disagreeing about some of these OSS characteristics being positive or negative, managers seem to face uncertainty in adopting OSS. This problem exists because most studies about this topic have neglected the necessity to investigate the experiences of the actual users of OSS, resulting in a variety of theories not providing the required clarity for decision makers to correctly estimate the implications of OSS for their business. Also, OSS is a broad concept including simple background software projects and, on the other extreme, highly complex software as ERP which causes problems for the interpretation of OSS�s strengths and weaknesses.

This paper attempts to address this issue by examining whether the initial expectations of FLOSS ERP implementers in SMEs about certain aspects of the system were confirmed after adoption. The thesis also assesses the difficulties of executing this research and discusses its consequences. Through forum posts, business users of various FLOSS ERP projects were asked to reflect on the aspects costs, reliability, customizability, security and support. 20 valid responses gathered the initial expectation about each aspect and captured whether the system lived up to their original expectations. The findings indicate that adopters have expectations about FLOSS ERP being low cost, highly reliable, easy to customize and secured, but lacking support capabilities. Also, business users seem to be able to make accurate estimations about costs, reliability, customizability and security. The thesis concludes with a discussion about the findings and their theoretical and managerial implications.
Keywords: Free/Libre Open Source Software, Small to medium-sized enterprises, Enterprise Resource Planning, Evaluation criteria