Ecosystem ethics: An ethical analysis of orchestrators' ultimate power and the dilemma of ecosystem ruling

Abstract

Ecosystems, platforms and app stores have become a de facto model for the modern software business. In the curated marketplaces of software ecosystems, independent software vendors are able to distribute their products and services to the customers. As the software industry has a tendency towards the winner-takes-all phenomenon, often only few of the competing ecosystems survive and share the market. As the software vendors are depending on the ecosystems to be able to publish their offerings, the orchestrators have achieved ultimate power to decide who are eligible to work and who are not. This study presents an ethical discussion on the ecosystem ruling dilemma: ecosystem focal company’s right to orchestrate what they offer against restricting liberty of independent software vendors. In the analysis, John Rawls’ theory of justice is used as a framing philosophical concept.