The paper analyzes the impact of institutional and cultural factors on a remarkable economic activity: the production of so-called open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and...

It is commonly believed that every contributor to a free and open source software project owns copyright in their incremental contribution to the project, and owns it solely. It is also commonly believed that one must avoid a legal conclusion that the project code is jointly authored—and...

Over the last few years, open source software (OSS) development has gained a huge popularity and has attracted a large variety of developers under its fold. According to software engineering folklore, the architecture and the organization of software depend on the communication patterns of the...

We study the effect of intellectual assets quality, social interaction, and reallocation of intellectual assets on the reputation of open source software projects, by analyzing 3,196 software games over twelve months. Our main findings are: 1) the aggregate performance of the individuals...

In this paper we report on the results of a study of the effort and motivations of individuals to contributing to the creation of Free/Open Source software. We used a Web-based survey, administered to 684 software developers in 287 F/OSS projects, to learn what lies behind the effort put into...

This study examines whether developers learn from their experience and from interactions with peers in OSS projects. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed that allows us to investigate (1) the extent to which OSS developers actually learn from their own experience and from interactions with...

This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to...