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Apache Sustained Competitive Advantage in the Web Server Industry

Open source communities such as the ones responsible for Linux and Apache became well known for producing, with volunteer labor innovating over the Internet, high-quality software that has been widely adopted by organizations. In the web server market, Apache has dominated in terms of market share for over 15 years, outperforming corporations and research institutions. The resource-based view (RBV) of firms posits that an organization outperforms its competitors because it has valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable resources. Accordingly, one concludes that Apache possesses such resources to sustain its competitive advantage. However, one does not know what those resources are. This chapter is an effort to locate them, answering the question: “What resources enable Apache to outperform its for-profit competitors consistently?” This research draws on the RBV to develop a series of propositions about Apache’s internal resources and organizational capabilities. For each proposition developed, methods for their empirical validation are proposed, and future research directions are provided.