  Interorganizational interactions are often complex and paradoxical. In this
research, we transcend two management paradoxes: competition versus cooperation
and open-source versus proprietary technology development. We follow the
OpenStack open-source ecosystem where competing firms cooperate in the
joint-development of a cloud infrastructure for big data. We provide a
narrative, complemented with social network visualizations, which depicts the
evolution of cooperation and competition. Our findings suggest that development
transparency and weak intellectual property rights (i.e., characteristics of
open-source ecosystems) allow a focal firm to transfer information and
resources more easily between multiple alliances.
