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...

Recent years have witnessed a continuous erosion of the Microsoft Internet Explorer share in the web browser market, mainly induced by the continuous gains of Mozilla Firefox, an open source software product. This tendency would seem to contradict the well-established belief that in a standards...

Front cover -- Contents -- Figures -- Notices -- Trademarks -- Preface -- The team that wrote this redbook -- Become a published author -- Comments welcome -- Chapter 1. An introduction to Linux -- 1.1 What is Linux -- 1.1.1 Standards -- 1.1.2 Minimum operating requirements -- 1.2 IBM and Linux...

Digital tools potentially enable remote collaboration. Analyzing how some 191 thousand software developers in the United States collaborate on the largest online opensource code repository platform, I find 79.8% of users clustering in only ten economic areas. Conditional on economic-area...