The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source

Abstract

The following commentary is part of First Monday's Special Issue #2: Open Source. Open Source developers have, perhaps without conscious intent, created a new and surprisingly successful economic paradigm for the production of software. Examining that paradigm can answer a number of important questions. It's not immediately obvious how Open Source [1] works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don't understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it's easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy. Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.

Practitioner perceptions of Open Source software in the embedded systems area

“…An important observation that impacts on the long-term availability of software relates to the increasing amount of software that is non-differentiating (Engelfriet, 2007;van der Linden et al, 2009;Perens, 2005;West, 2007). This non-differentiating software is expensive to develop and maintain yet offers limited commercial advantage.…”

Directions for open source software over the next decade

“…This may be a view that is advantageous and even promoted by some proprietary software interests, but many of the significant open source software projects have paid, well-trained core workers, and many of the rest have such people contributing on a part-time basis. Indeed, the motivations for contributing to and using open source projects have begun to be better understood, with business or enterprise models and economic arguments to back them up [3,5,[11][12][13]15,[17][18][19][20]25,26].…”

Reassessing Brooks’ Law for the Free Software Community

“…Each of these cohorts has brought to attention one (or several) aspects of this approach [26], criticized [10] or advocated it [22], and, at times, compared it with established approaches [1,30].…”