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This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of the open source development model as a global sourcing strategy-opensourcing, as we term it here-whereby commerical companies and open source communities collaborate on development of software of commercial interest to the company. Building on previous research on information systems outsourcing, a theoretical framework for exploring the opensourcing phenomenon is derived. The first phase of the research concerned qualitative case studies involving three commercial organizations (IONA Technologies, Philips Medical Systems, and Telefonica) that had "liberated" what had hitherto been proprietary software and sought to grow a global open source community around their product. We followed this with a large-scale survey involving additional exemplars of the phenomenon. The study identifies a number of symmetrical and …