The open-source software operating system Linux is a free-of-charge substitute to proprietary systems like Microsoft Windows. By using a cross-country data set, this paper finds evidence that increased piracy of proprietary software has a negative impact on adoption of desktop versions of Linux....

The emergence and market success of Linux in recent years has been impressive. Contrary to common belief, commercial enterprises are active only in the provision of services (including distribution) related to Linux. The emergence of this service market has paved the way for Linux to become a...

What happens to market structure as an industry’s operations lean ever more on software? We find that software availability is associated with an increase in entry and an increase in exit by the oldest and most established firms. We formalize alternative mechanisms by which this could happen...

The starting point for this paper is the general paucity of research on the demand-side of custom software development. As an initial step, we derive and estimate a Hedonic Pricing model using a sample of 160 projects executed by a large software solutions vendor based in India. Our results...

Free/Libre Open Source software (FLOSS) diffusion represents one of the main evolutions of the Information Technology (IT) industry in recent years. Such an approach appears exemplary in the context of a knowledge based economy, for a growing number of industrial activities, for which the scope...