Purpose: A growing number of open source software emerges in many segments of the software market. In addition, software products usually exhibit network externalities. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of open source software on the quality strategies of proprietary software...

Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The “private investment” model assumesreturns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The “collective action” model assumes that under conditions of...

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...

In the ICT sector, product-software is an important factor for the quality of the products (e.g. cell phones). In this context, open source software enables firms to avoid quality competition as they can cooperate on quality without an explicit contract. The economics of open source (OS) versus...