Maria Alessandra Rossi
U. of Siena

Rossi

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(Saturday, 1st January 2005)

Title : The Economics of Open Source Software

The Free/Open Source software (F/OSS) phenomenon has shown a considerable degree of vitality and dynamism in recent years; so much vitality and dynamism, in fact, to deserve the qualification of new institution for knowledge creation. This workshop will review the most salient aspects of the phenomenon from a multidisciplinary perspective, exploring (a) the nature of and the interplay among the relevant actors’ motivations and the way these sustain the F/OSS institutional structure; (b) the governance of F/OSS projects; (c) the cooperative and competitive relationships linking F/OSS communities to commercial actors; (d) intellectual property-related issues; and (e) the debate on the opportunity of providing various forms of government support to F/OSS development. The presentation will aim at opening up the discussion on the viability of F/OSS-like institutional arrangements for domains of knowledge creation different from software.

Bibliographical references :

Must read reference : Josh Lerner, Jean Tirole [2004], "The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond", Harvard NOM Working Paper No. 04-35.

Klaus M. Schmidt and Monika Schnitze [2002], "Public Subsidies for Open Source? Some Economic Policy Issues of the Software Market", CEPR Discussion Paper n°3793

Maria Alessandra Rossi [2004], "Decoding the'Free/Open Source (F/OSS) Software Puzzle' a survey of theoretical and empirical contributions", forthcoming on J.Bitzer and P.Schroder, 2005. "The Economics of Open Source Software Development: Analyzing Motivation, Organization, Innovation and Competition in the Open Source Software Revolution", Elsevier.