Stallman proposed a revolutionary idea in 1984 with the "Free Software Foundation", subsequently confirmed in 1998 in the "Open Source Definition". The key concept is that there should be unrestricted access to computer programming codes: anyone should be able to use and modify them and...

A growing body of economic literature is addressing the incentives of the individuals that take part to the Open Source movement. However, empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (OSS). During 2002, we conducted a large-scale...

Contrary to what most people assume, Open Source doesn't just mean access to the source code. A software is considered Open Source if and only if its distribution terms [i.e. the license] comply with the set of criteria defined by the Open Source Definition (OSD). That is, to say that a code is...

This paper studies the contributions to Open Source projects of software firms. Our goal is to analyse whether they follow the same regularities that characterize the behaviour of individual programmers. An exhaustive empirical analysis is carried out using data on project membership, project...

A growing body of economic literature is exploring the incentives of the agents involved in the Open Source movement. However, most empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (Open Source firms). This paper contributes to the...

During the '60s and the '70s, basically all software was Open Source and everyone was allowed to copy, modify and redistribute computer programs. When software ceased to be hardware-specific and the diffusion of computers took off, firms started to produce software independently from hardware...