We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

During the last two decades, projects have become increasingly important and recognizable tools for achieving competitiveness, strategic aims and much needed positive changes. The consequence of this, among other things, is the growing number of projects which emerge and are carried out in all...

In recent years there has been an increasing diffusion of open source projects, as well as an increasing interest among scholars on the topic. Open source software (OSS) is developed by communities of programmers and users, usually sponsored by private firms; OSS is available in the public...

PySAL is an open source library for spatial analysis written in the object-oriented language Python. It is built upon shared functionality in two exploratory spatial data analysis packages--GeoDA and STARS--and is intended to leverage the shared development of these components. This paper...

This paper explores empirically what factors influence a firm’s decision to contribute and to take leadership in open source projects. Increasing firms’ participation in the development of open source software (OSS) is generally perceived as a puzzle. Assuming that firms face a...

I consider a Vickrey-Salop model of spatial product differentiation with quasi-linear utility functions and contrast two modes of production, the proprietary model where entrepreneurs sell software to the users, and the open source model where users participate in software development. I show...

The rivalry between developers of open source and proprietary software encourages open source developers to court users and respond to their needs. If the open source developer wants to promote her own open source standard and solutions, she may choose liberal license terms such as those of the...

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS), and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit...

The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...