Résumé
Open source transforms the ways in which companies create and capture value. Companies that decide to adopt an open source strategy agree to open up their innovation process, to be in greater interaction with customers and users, to share the results of innovation with as many people as possible, without discrimination and often free of charge. These elements contribute to change the way companies do business. To understand these changes, we adopt two different but complementary perspectives. First, we use the business model concept to understand how open source project leaders manage to articulate different degrees of innovation openness with typical forms of valorization. We approach the creation and appropriation of value of these actors in an absolute way, with a reflection focused on the project level. In a second step, we go further upstream from open source and observe how competing contributors from the same cooperation community manage to create and appropriate value. To this end, we mobilize the concept of coopetition and adopt a more relative vision of creation and appropriation with a focus on the inter-organizational level.We adopt a mixed research methodology with a first quantitative study that allows us to identify three typical open source project business models. From these three categories, we select the cases for our qualitative study on coopetition in open source communities.Our results allow us to qualify three types of project business models: exploration, expertise and optimization projects. We then show how the choices made by project leaders within the framework of these business models affect the coopetitive situation of companies that will contribute to the communities of these same projects. We describe a coopetitive situation in which value creation between coopetitors is mediated by the project leader. We show that this value creation is extensive in that coopetitors cannot choose with which companies they will cooperate. Above all, we stress that the openness of innovation, non-discrimination and free access do not in any way alter the coopetitors' capacity for appropriation. This appropriation is simply diverted to objects of value that we qualify precisely. Finally, our results show that open source is favorable to the establishment of coopetitive situations and that companies that engage in it can find many benefits.