IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/uea/ueaccp/2008_02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Open Source Licensing in Mixed Markets, or Why Open Source Software Does Not Succeed

Author

Listed:
  • Alexia Gaudeul

    (Centre for Competition Policy and School of Economics, University of East Anglia)

Abstract

The rivalry between developers of open source and proprietary software encourages open source developers to court users and respond to their needs. If the open source developer wants to promote her own open source standard and solutions, she may choose liberal license terms such as those of the Berkeley Software Distribution as proprietary developers will then and it easier to adopt her standard in their products. If she wants to promote the use of open source software per se, she may use more restrictive license terms such as the General Public License to discourage proprietary appropriation of her effort. I show that open source software that comes late into a market will be less likely than more innovative open source software to be compatible with proprietary software, but is also more likely to be made more accessible to inexperienced users.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexia Gaudeul, 2008. "Open Source Licensing in Mixed Markets, or Why Open Source Software Does Not Succeed," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) 2008-02, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    • Handle: RePEc:uea:ueaccp:2008_02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/ccp/CCP-08-02.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Franke, Nikolaus & Hippel, Eric von, 2003. "Satisfying heterogeneous user needs via innovation toolkits: the case of Apache security software," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(7), pages 1199-1215, July.
    2. Josh Lerner & Jean Tirole, 2002. "Some Simple Economics of Open Source," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 50(2), pages 197-234, June.
    3. Stefano Comino & Fabio Manenti, 2005. "Government Policies Supporting Open Source Software for the Mass Market," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 26(2), pages 217-240, December.
    4. Jürgen Bitzer & Philipp J.H. Schröder, 2005. "The Impact of Entry and Competition by Open Source Software on Innovation Activity," Industrial Organization 0512001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Justin Pappas Johnson, 2002. "Open Source Software: Private Provision of a Public Good," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 11(4), pages 637-662, December.
    6. Katz, Michael L & Shapiro, Carl, 1985. "Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(3), pages 424-440, June.
    7. Schmidt, Klaus & Schnitzer, Monika, 2003. "Public Subsidies for Open Source? Some Economic Policy Issues of the Software Market," CEPR Discussion Papers 3793, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    8. Ramon Casadesus-Masanell & Pankaj Ghemawat, 2006. "Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(7), pages 1072-1084, July.
    9. Hertel, Guido & Niedner, Sven & Herrmann, Stefanie, 2003. "Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(7), pages 1159-1177, July.
    10. von Krogh, Georg & Spaeth, Sebastian & Lakhani, Karim R., 2003. "Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(7), pages 1217-1241, July.
    11. Mikko Mustonen, 2005. "When Does a Firm Support Substitute Open Source Programming?," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(1), pages 121-139, March.
    12. Eric von Hippel, 1998. "Economics of Product Development by Users: The Impact of "Sticky" Local Information," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 44(5), pages 629-644, May.
    13. Gaudeul Alex, 2007. "Do Open Source Developers Respond to Competition? The LATEX Case Study," Review of Network Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 6(2), pages 1-25, June.
    14. von Krogh, Georg & von Hippel, Eric, 2003. "Special issue on open source software development," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(7), pages 1149-1157, July.
    15. Johnson, Justin P., 2006. "Collaboration, peer review and open source software," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 18(4), pages 477-497, November.
    16. Eric von Hippel, 1994. ""Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 40(4), pages 429-439, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alexia Gaudeul, 2008. "Consumer Welfare and Market Structure in a Model of Competition Between Open Source and Proprietary Software," Working Papers 08-31, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia.
    2. Robin Ng, 2024. "Free and Open-Source Software: Coordination and Competition," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2024_585, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alexia Gaudeul, 2008. "Consumer Welfare and Market Structure in a Model of Competition between Open Source and Proprietary Software," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) 2008-31, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    2. Engelhardt, Sebastian v. & Freytag, Andreas, 2013. "Institutions, culture, and open source," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 90-110.
    3. Bitzer, Jürgen & Geishecker, Ingo, 2010. "Who contributes voluntarily to OSS? An investigation among German IT employees," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 165-172, February.
    4. Susan Athey & Glenn Ellison, 2014. "Dynamics of Open Source Movements," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(2), pages 294-316, June.
    5. Cerquera Dussán, Daniel & Müller, Bettina, 2009. "Open Source, ICT infrastructure and firm performance," ZEW Discussion Papers 09-089, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    6. Thomas Christiaans, 2013. "On the Dynamics of Competition between Commercial and Free Software," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 1(1), pages 37-58, June.
    7. Dongryul Lee & Byung Kim, 2013. "Motivations for Open Source Project Participation and Decisions of Software Developers," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 41(1), pages 31-57, January.
    8. Michael Schwarz & Yuri Takhteyev, 2010. "Half a Century of Public Software Institutions: Open Source as a Solution to Hold‐Up Problem," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 12(4), pages 609-639, August.
    9. Nicholas Economides & Evangelos Katsamakas, 2005. "Linux vs. Windows: A Comparison of Innovation Incentives and a Case Study," Working Papers 05-11, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    10. Georg von Krogh & Eric von Hippel, 2006. "The Promise of Research on Open Source Software," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(7), pages 975-983, July.
    11. Bitzer, Jurgen & Schroder, Philipp J.H., 2005. "Bug-fixing and code-writing: The private provision of open source software," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 389-406, July.
    12. Michael Schwarz & Yuri Takhteyev, 2009. "Half a Century of Public Software Institutions: Open Source as a Solution to Hold-Up Problem," NBER Working Papers 14946, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Gächter, Simon & von Krogh, Georg & Haefliger, Stefan, 2010. "Initiating private-collective innovation: The fragility of knowledge sharing," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(7), pages 893-906, September.
    14. Llanes, Gastón & de Elejalde, Ramiro, 2013. "Industry equilibrium with open-source and proprietary firms," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 36-49.
    15. Stephen M. Maurer & Suzanne Scotchmer, 2006. "Open Source Software: The New Intellectual Property Paradigm," NBER Working Papers 12148, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Nicholas Economides & Evangelos Katsamakas, 2005. "Linux vs. Windows: A comparison of application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary software platforms+," Working Papers 05-03, NET Institute, revised Sep 2005.
    17. Sheen S. Levine & Michael J. Prietula, 2014. "Open Collaboration for Innovation: Principles and Performance," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 25(5), pages 1414-1433, October.
    18. Sadowski, Bert M. & Sadowski-Rasters, Gaby & Duysters, Geert, 2008. "Transition of governance in a mature open software source community: Evidence from the Debian case," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 20(4), pages 323-332, December.
    19. Rullani, Francesco & Haefliger, Stefan, 2013. "The periphery on stage: The intra-organizational dynamics in online communities of creation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(4), pages 941-953.
    20. Bitzer, Jurgen, 2004. "Commercial versus open source software: the role of product heterogeneity in competition," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 28(4), pages 369-381, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Open Source; Software; Standards; Compatibility; Network Effects; Duopoly; Mixed Markets; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Licensing.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
    • L31 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • O34 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital
    • O38 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uea:ueaccp:2008_02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Juliette Hardmad (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esueauk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.