Challenges of OSS Development in Developing Countries: Case of Iran

Open Source Software (OSS) could be a potential alternative for ICT growth in less developed and developing countries. This approach could provide developing countries with many benefits like: saving in cost of development, higher quality, providing opportunity for knowledge and technology transfer etc. In spite of this potential benefits, statistics about success of OSS projects in developing countries is not promising. This paper investigates the main challenges and difficulties which we recognized as the major obstacles in OSS development in developing countries. We conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with three different groups of experts in open source projects and through in-depth analysis of interviews recognized eight different categories of challenges that overcoming them can greatly improve the progress of OSS in Iran.