Our paper analyses the free software opportunities for developing economies. First we consider the adoption’s dimension. We show that they seem to be a credible option to support the computerization of these countries. Indeed, the free software could be an alternative to the piracy. Second we...

Considering the french case of Free Software Service Companies (FSSCs), this paper analyses Free software’s market-oriented aspects. We try to answer a fundamental question for free software: is the software industry have room for an alternative economic model based on the communities’...

The paper analyses the productive model of "Free Software Services Companies" (FSSC) which offer open source software services. The paper is based on a survey of the 11 most important French FSSC, carried out between January 2001 and February 2002 and based on semi-directing interviews. We...

This paper aims to analyze the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the development of the software industry in these countries. The study is centred on software production and IT-related services - software development, chip design and electronic devices design, computer and Internet...

This paper examines evidence of the role that reputation plays in determining contractual outcomes. We conduct an empirical analysis of the Indian customized software industry. We analyze a data set containing detailed information about 230 projects carried out by 125 software firms that we had...

This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from...

In this paper, we explore the economics of free under perpetual licensing. In particular, we focus on two emerging software business models that involve a free component: feature-limited freemium (FLF) and uniform seeding (S). Under FLF, the firm offers the basic software version for free, while...

We analyze the characteristics of new businesses in the German ICT industry, distinguishing them based on their choice between two IPR regimes: open source software (OSS) or closed source software (CSS). The share of new firms with an OSS-based business model has increased considerably over the...

A central tenet of the open source software development methodology is that the community of users and developers is instrumental in improving the quality of software. I conceptualize open source communities as information repositories to understand how community members help in improving...