Over the course of this chapter three crucial aspects of the law's relationship with FOSS licenses are reviewed. Firstly, a comparison of the licenses themselves is outlined with particular regard to copyright provisions. In this respect, it is noted that while there is a great diversity of FOSS...

In this paper, we study oligopolistic competition between closed and open source softwares. By intersecting existing economic contributions on open source, we propose a two stage game with perfect information and product differetiation in which producers firstly set softwares quality, then they...

We study an endogenous growth model where a profit-motivated R and D sector coexists with the introduction of free blueprints invented by philanthropists. These goods are priced at marginal cost, contrary to proprietary ones which are produced by a monopoly owned by the inventor. We show that...

Much of today's software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...