Application of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in Estimating Importance of Open Source Software (OSS) User Acceptance Factors

Open Source Software (OSS) is a phenomenon that has caused turbulence in the smooth sail of the Software Development Bandwagon. The OSS movement was initiated by special interest groups of hackers and developers who perceived the closed source trade of proprietary software as a corporate controlled restrain on the freedom of scientific process. Making the source code of the software available to all users defined their main philosophy of scientific freedom. Such independent factions regrouped to initiate the revolutionary Free Software Movement, spearheaded by an enterprising MIT researcher Richard Stallman. Over the past few decades, thousands of Open Source Communities have emerged globally to develop cutting edge software solutions and many of them match eye to eye and shoulder to shoulder to analogous commercial software. Many researchers have published realms of information on OSS topics such as - OSS acceptance by Public and Private Sectors, Developer motivations in development of OSS, Licensing issues in OSS and Usability aspects on OSS etc. This paper is an attempt to provide some perceptions on usability issues of OSS. Authors have conducted a thorough Review of Literature in the same field to identify drivers and barriers pertaining to usage parameters of OSS. These variables were used to design a questionnaire and data were collected using traditional and web-based surveys. On the basis of the collected data, statistical tools were used to extract factors that concern the usability aspects of OSS. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, pioneered by Thomas Saaty, was then used to ascertain the relative importance of indicators and factors as well. On the basis of this exercise, importance ranks were assigned to the OSS usability indicators as well as the OSS usability factors. Though many research papers have been published on OSS usability aspects but there have been few attempts made to evaluate the relative significance of usability indicators and factors. The importance of indicators highlighted in this research might be very useful to OSS development communities to prioritize their development objectives and put more emphasis on certain indicators that are perceived more significant by users. OSS users can use these findings and results to evaluate OSS products on the basis of the measurement of the indicators pertaining to different comparable OSS and closed source options.