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Examining OSS Success: Information Technology Acceptance by FireFox Users Andrzej Slomka1 , Tomasz Przechlewski1, and Stanislaw Wrycza1 Gda´ nsk University, Department of Information Systems 81-824 Sopot, ul. Armii Krajowej 119/121, Poland [email protected], [email protected]

1 Introduction Open source software (oss) is currently one of the most debated phenomena in both academia and the software industry. Several oss systems have achieved significant market success but they are rather server-side applications, such as the Apache web server, mail transport agent Sendmail, or other components of it infrastructure. On the other hand penetration of oss systems on the market of desktop applications is rather limited and it is virtually dominated by products of one software vendor, i.e. Microsoft. Recently one exception to the rule of non-existence of oss at the desktop was observed however. Mozilla FireFox, an Open Source web browser achieved 10 million downloads in one single month of December 2004, demonstrating success in the market totally dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The aim of the paper is to find out factors, which encourage users to adopt FireFox by applying the well-known framework of Technology Acceptance Model. The paper is organized as follows. A brief overview of oss is presented in the subsequent section. Conceptual models of users’ acceptance of it including Technology Acceptance Model (tam) is shortly discussed next. Then the research method and survey design are described, followed by results of the data analysis. Discussion of the findings concludes the paper.

2 Open Source Software At the most basic level, the term open source software simply means software for which the source code is publicly available and which can be distributed freely without any restrictions [1, 2]. Open source software is currently one of the most debated phenomena in both academia and the software industry [3]. However most of the research have been devoted to explain what are the incentives driving individuals and/or organizations to develop software without any obvious economic compensation (cf. [4]). Significantly smaller attention

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Andrzej Slomka, Tomasz Przechlewski, and Stanislaw Wrycza

is paid to explain the reasons why os software is accepted or rejected by the users. Currently open source software usage ratios are much higher in server applications, such as networking or dbms applications than at the desktop [5]. For example, the open source Apache is constantly reported to be the most popular web server in use with market share exceeding 70% of the total [6]. Many more examples of fine os server software exist, such as the popular scripting languages php and Python, database systems Postgresql and mysql, content management systems like Plone or phpnuke, etc. [7, 5]. Numerous desktop applications were developed too, such as the kde/Gnome desktop managers, the office suite OpenOffice.org or communication applications such as e-mail clients or web browsers. Although functionally compatible (or even technically superior) to the proprietary counterparts, their usage is much less common. FireFox is the only exception to this rule. Mozilla FireFox is an Open Source web browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation. FireFox was released in December 2004 and achieved 10 million downloads in one single month [8]. What is extremely unusual in case of os projects is that its launch was supported with a “traditional” marketing campaign.1 A survey released by [9] reports that ms Internet Explorer’s share in us was down to 88.9% in May 2005. Moreover the survey shows that the FireFox usage tends to vary significantly by country. For example it has more than 22% market share in Germany, almost 7% in the us while less than 3% in Japan. FireFox is claimed to be superior to ms Internet Explorer with several features: security, compliance to new Web standards and functionality. It is reported to work faster, particularly with older hardware. And of course it is working on a wide range of software platforms, not only the Wintel one.

3 Conceptual Models of Users’ Acceptance of IT Several models of adoption and acceptance of it were developed, including models build on economics of standards theories and diffusion of innovation ones [10]. The former tries to explain the adoption of it using such economic categories as positive network externalities, switching costs and lock-in [11] while the latter consider various characteristics of innovation, that influence individual adoption decisions. Rogers [10] suggests the following 5 innovation features that influence the adoption process: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Prior studies show that compatibil1

The Mozilla Foundation raised over $250,000 for a full-page New York Times advertisement through user donations. A similar advertisement was featured in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The success resulted soon in full column articles published in Businesswek and Newsweek magazines featuring FireFox.

Examining OSS Success: IT Acceptance by FireFox Users

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ity with existing technologies and relative advantage were positively related to adoption2 while technological complexity was related negatively. Technology adoption not necessarily is followed by sustained usage, so a different important aspect of it implementation concerns acceptance 3 and effective utilization of it systems. Several models were proposed to explain it acceptance, including: Technology Acceptance Model (tam), Theory of Reasoned Action (tra), Theory of Planned Behaviour (tpb), and Task Technology Fit (ttf, cf. [12]) ones4 . All of them originate in social sciences research. A widely used theory explaining the acceptance of it is the Technology Acceptance Model [15]. The tam model was derived from Ajzen and Fishbein’s tra and tpb which have evolved from tra [15, 16]. It is meant to explain the determinants of computer acceptance that is general, capable of explaining user behaviour across a broad range of end-user computing technologies and user populations, while at the same time being both parsimonious and theoretically justified [15]. The original model consists of just a few factors, namely: perceived usefulness (pu), perceived ease of use (peou), attitude toward using (att), behavioural intention to use (bi), and system usage. tam is depicted in Fig. 1. White boxes and solid line arrows represents the core model; dotted lines and gray boxes depicts extensions.

Fig. 1. Technology Acceptance Model (tam), cf. [15]

Perceived usefulness is defined as the user’s subjective probability that using a specific application will increase his/her job performance within an organizational context. Perceived ease of use is defined as the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free of effort.5 The remaining factors are directly adopted from tra/tpb.6 tam postulates that 2 3 4 5 6

It should be noted however that these innovation features are contradictory: to achieve a greater advantage the innovation is expected to be more incompatible. Acceptance can be formally defined as “the demonstrable willingness within a user group to employ information technology for the tasks it is designed to support”. More complex models are proposed as extensions or combinations of the classical ones, cf. [13, 14]. One should note that peou is very similar to self-efficacy, and thus tam has much in common with models based on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory [17]. Behavioural intention is a measure of the strength of user’s intention to perform a specific behaviour while attitude are user’s positive or negative feelings about performing target behaviour.

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usage is determined by behavioral intention, which is jointly determined by attitude and perceived usefulness. Attitude in turn is jointly determined by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Moreover it is assumed that pu is determined by peou (cf. Fig. 1). External variables (such as system characteristics, external/internal support etc.) are fully mediated by pu and peou which are fundamental in explaining the user’s behaviour. Many prior studies have extended the above described “classical model” with various external variables, including user characteristics, organizational support, and subjective norms (cf. [18, 16, 19]). Primarily designed for explaining fairy simple it systems in a business environment, tam has been successfully tested in various applications areas: on-line shopping [20], Internet banking [21], mobile commerce [22], web site usage [23, 24], search engine adoption [25], etc. A review of tam-related studies can be found in [26, 27]. On the other side tam parsimony implies that the model has serious limitations and should not be applied unconditionally. It is pointed out that tam performs poorly when explaining organizational adoption (mandated use), adoption of complex technologies, or those requiring prior extensive training and/or coordination. tam demonstrates good explanatory power in case of adoption of innovation by individuals making autonomous choices about whether to adopt personal use innovations that do not require extensive specialized knowledge prior to adoption [28]. The adoption of FireFox is a perfect match to the above requirements.

4 Research Method and Survey Design Facing such a spectacular business success it is very interesting to find out what factors encourage users to adopt FireFox. Such findings will have both theoretical and practical implications as many vendors are nowadays considering to support Open Source Software as well as many organizations—both government institutions and commercial enterprises—are considering to adopt it. Thus the following research question is posed in this paper: Does tam hold for FireFox users? The question implies the following standard set of hypotheses: perceived usefulness has a direct effect on intention to use FireFox (H1), perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a direct effect on attitude towards using FireFox (H2), perceived ease of use has a direct effect on perceived usefulness (H3), and attitude towards using FireFox has a direct effect on intention to use it (H4). To verify them a statistical survey was performed. Original instruments for tam as developed by Davis consists of 6-item scales for pu and peou [29]. While items for pu focus on features such as productivity, effectiveness and performance, peou related questions concentrate on easy to learn and flexibility. In various studies applying tam, the factors were operationalized with different scales and/or number of items.7 7

For example Igbaria et al. [18] use 4 items both for pu and peou while BurtonJones and Hubona [30] extend both scales to 10 items.


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Both scales attained high reliability and demonstrate convergent and discriminant validity. To conduct the study the original instruments were adapted and translated into Polish.8 A pretest questionnaire was conducted resulting in minor changes for improved readability and clarity.9 In order to target potential FireFox users, a Web-based survey was employed. An e-mail letter explaining shortly the objectives of the research and containing a link to a questionnaire form was send to the members of a few Polish news groups, known to be visited by experienced it systems users. The groups selected were: Linux, ms Windows, and OpenOffice users newsgroups as well as two groups related to Web site design/development and browser plugins development. Within a week 247 questionnaires were gathered. Most responses were received within the first two days (170 questionnaires). A few replies contained missing data, so they were excluded from the sample. Also, 4 respondents identified themselves as younger than 14 and further 2 as older than 55. These respondent were excluded from the sample. Finally respondents reporting to work more than 18 hours per day with it systems were excluded as well10 . The resulted sample contains 229 usable responses (133 respondents identified themselves as employees, the remaining 96 were students). Reported mean age was 25.9 years (median 23.5, standard deviation 7.4). The respondents appeared to be rather heavy users of it as they declared to work on the average 8.7 hours per day with it systems (median 8.2, standard deviation 3.5 hours).

5 Data Analysis and Results Partial Least Squares (pls), as implemented in pls-Graph version 3.0 [32], was used to evaluate the model of FireFox acceptance. pls is a structural equation modelling technique similar to more popular, covariance-based sem models (Lisrel, Amos) [33, 34]. pls allows for small sample sizes and makes less strict assumptions about the distribution of the data [35]. The measurement model in pls is assessed in terms of item loadings and reliability coefficients, as well as the convergent and discriminant validity. The relevant statistics for the measurement model are presented in Table 1. Convergent validity can be assessed by inspecting factor loadings and the average variance extracted (ave). Item loadings greater than 0.7 are considered significant [34]. All items load highly on respective constructs except pu1, which have demonstrated exceptionally low loading (0.27). In result this item 8 9 10

The authors are unaware of any it usage survey in Poland based on tam. Our instrument consists of 16 items in total, including 5-items, 4-items, and 3items for peou, pu/att, and ito respectively. See [31] and App. A for the details. The survey was aimed at those respondents who use FireFox in his/her work and not for fun, hobby or personal use. That is why the survey was announced at professional newsgroups and additionally young or elder respondents were removed from the sample.

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Andrzej Slomka, Tomasz Przechlewski, and Stanislaw Wrycza Table 1. Summary of the measurement model

Construct Usefulness Ease of Use Attitude Intention

Loadings range 0.886–0.902 0.723–0.886 0.741–0.931 0.911–0.954

t-range 55.01–103.83 10.94–21.33 15.16–106.14 49.51–86.99

cr 0.909 0.890 0.912 0.953

ave 0.689 0.621 0.723 0.872

Table 2. Discriminant validity of the measurement model Construct Usefulness (pu) Ease of Use (peou) Attitude (att) Intention (bi)

pu 0.912 0.646 0.824 0.832

peou – 0.872 0.625 0.667

att – – 0.850 0.803

bi – – – 0.934

was dropped from the subsequent analysis, so pu was operationalized with a 4-item scale. Table 1 shows that all loadings surpass the required minimum and the respective t-values are highly significant. ave measures the variance captured by the construct relative to the variance due to measurement error and to be acceptable it should be greater than 0.5 [36]. For all constructs ave exceed the required minimum value. Construct reliability was assessed using composite reliability coefficient (cr), the interpretation of which is similar to that of Cronbach’s alpha. Value of cr greater than 0.7 is considered acceptable. As shown in Table 1 all reliability coefficient surpass the required minimum. The discriminant validity of the measures was assessed by comparing the interconstruct correlations with the square root of ave on the individual construct [36]. For discriminant validity to be demonstrated square root of aves of all constructs (diagonal elements in Table 2) should be greater than the interconstruct correlations (off-diagonal elements in appropriate column, cf. Table 2). As shown in Table 2 all constructs were more strongly correlated with their own measures than with any of the other constructs (one should note however that the cross-correlation is rather high). Thus discriminant validity was demonstrated. The structural model in pls is assessed by examining the path coefficients and its significance with t-statistics. Standard R2 coefficient is used as an indicator of the overall goodness-of-fit measure of the model. The path coefficients (shown alongside the single-headed arrows) and t-values (in the parenthesis below the coefficient values) for our model are shown in Figure 2. As all coefficient values were significant all hypotheses were supported. The model shows very good fit as 84% of variance in bi and 74% in attitude were explained by the model (cf. Figure 2). The results are consistent with most of tam studies [16]: perceived usefulness appeared to be the strongest determinant of attitude towards usage and usage intentions, with standardized regression coefficient equals 0.651 and


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Fig. 2. Estimated structural model of FireFox acceptance

0.275 respectively. peou, the other key determinant of intention, again consistent with prior studies, exhibits a less significant effect. The above suggests that FireFox usage seems to be motivated by perceived superiority of the browser over ms Internet Explorer. FireFox is claimed to be less likely to be targeted by crackers, so it is more secure and more resistant to spyware and other programs of this sort. Moreover, its interface is more comfortable, with tabs able to display multiple web pages and offers better support for new standards such as css.11 The users believe that FireFox is safer and less vulnerable to security hazard, has a better compliance to standards and functionality. Prior studies suggest a different explanation of the above phenomenon, namely the effect of ease of use on system usage found significant for inexperienced users becomes insignificant when users get acquainted with the system [16]. Web browsers are one of the most frequently used applications today, so it seems to be reasonable to assume high level of proficiency of an average user. To investigate the effect of user’s experience we have extended our model adding user’s experience to it (measured as daily average time of work with it systems) but found it insignificant.

6 Summary Perceived usefulness was identified as the principal determinant of intention to use FireFox while perceived ease of use was found to be a significant but 11

Microsoft strategic decision to integrate its browser into the Windows operating system has helped to defeat Netscape but at the same time has caused that newer versions of ie would only be available with newer versions of Windows (every 3 years or more). In a fast evolving Internet environment it means that IE has become a “sort-of” unsupported product, as no important functional improvements have been added to it for years.

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less substantive influence on usage intention. Unusual for an os project, massive promotion of FireFox featured the browser as technically superior to ms Internet Explorer. The campaign resulted in huge success and our survey confirms that it was well targeted as FireFox usage is predominantly motivated by its perceived superiority. Although the results have shown strong support for tam in explaining intentions to use FireFox, nevertheless, as the findings are based on a single study, they should be interpreted with caution especially when generalizing the results. In particular, respondents were gathered from convenience, webbased survey of Polish FireFox users, and were not sampled from a specific population. Future research should test whether tam applies within other settings as well, i.e. various oss applications, different organizational settings or user groups. The decision to use the simplest variant of tam is another limitation of the study and future research should verify more complex models. In the context of oss adoption it would be interesting to find out the impact on acceptance of such important factors, as: perceived available user resources [19], perceived risk, management support [18], or peer influence.

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A Measurement items The following items were used in survey instrument (all measured using sevenpoint Likert scale): Perceived Usefulness, PU: Using FF make it easier to do my job (pu1, dropped), Using FF increase my job performance (pu2), Using FF allow to accomplish my tasks more quickly (pu3), Using FF enhance my effectiveness in my job (pu4), I find FF useful in my job (pu5). Perceived ease of use, PEOU: It is difficult to use FF (peou1), Learning to use FF is ease for me (peou2), Customizing FF is frustrating (peou3), Navigating FF menus is ease (peou4), I find FF ease to use (peou5). Attitude, ATT: The idea of using FF is a mistake (att1), I am glad I have found FF (att2), I would like to use FF regularly (att3), I would not switch from FF to other browser (att4). Intention, BI: I will use FF on a regular basis in my job (bi2), I will use FF frequently in my job (bi2), I will recommend FF to others (bi3).