Collaboration post‐acquisition: The role of acquirers' motives
Post-acquisition collaboration with open-source partners rises when acquirers aim to protect complementarities and falls when they aim to extract code or talent.
Summary
The study follows 143 acquisitions of the corporate sponsors of 298 open-source software projects and tracks contributions to each project before and after the deal. Contributions from the acquired sponsor and from its partners rise when the acquirer's motive is to protect complementarities, meaning the open-source project supports the acquirer's own products, and fall when the acquirer's motive is to redeploy the sponsor's code or talent for its own uses. The results imply that partners in an open-source project should assess who is likely to acquire the sponsor and why, since the acquirer's motive shapes whether collaboration continues.
Editor's opinion
After an acquisition, whether a partner ecosystem keeps collaborating depends on why the acquirer bought. Buyers who want to protect a complement keep the partners contributing, while buyers who want to pull out the code and the people drive them away. Anyone who depends on a jointly built platform should ask what the likely acquirer wants, and acquirers should be clear on which of the two they are doing, because the ecosystem will read it.
Key concepts
post-acquisition collaboration · open source · acquirer motives · complementarities