De-Commodifying Software? Open Source Software Between Business Strategy and Social Movement

De-Commodifying Software? Open Source Software Between Business Strategy and Social Movement

Focusing on open source software the origin, development and organisation of a process of de-commodification is examined in an industry that usually relies on strong provisions to protect intellectual property. Open source denotes a cooperative and voluntary mode of software development cross-cutting organisational boundaries and transcending relations of market exchange. Starting with the Open...

Building a Business on Open Source Software

For many years, free and open source software was exclusively associated with the research community, in contrast to the closed source products developed by commercial software vendors. Over the past decade, there has been a vast increase in the availability of open source software, growing from such projects as Linux and Apache. Open source software is being widely adopted in industry, which h...

Social Preferences and Open Source Software Development

Open source software (OSS), and open innovation in general, has received increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners. Based on recent literature on social preference from behavior economics, we propose a finite-horizon dynamic model to study the interactions between OSS developers who are either purely self-interested or conditional cooperators. We find that selfinterested deve...

Competitive Strategy for Open Source Software

C open source software (COSS) products—privately developed software based on publicly available source code—represent a rapidly growing, multibillion-dollar market. A unique aspect of competition in the COSS market is that many open source licenses require firms to make certain enhancements public, creating an incentive for firms to free ride on the contributions of others. This practice raises...

Democratizing Business Software: Small Business Ecosystems for Open Source Applications