The open source paradigm is often defined as a collaborative effort, implying that firms and consumers come together in a non-competitive climate. We show here that open source development can arise from a competitive climate. Under competition, we find that open source is the surplus maximizing...

This paper describes the history and the commonly used software licensing terms of the free software and open source movements. It explains the GPL and discusses attempts to enforce the GPL. The GPL is a revolutionary copyright license that has allowed software developers to use existing law to...

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS) and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit...

I consider a Vickrey-Salop model of spatial product differentiation with quasi-linear utility functions and contrast two modes of production, the proprietary model where entrepreneurs sell software to the users, and the open source model where users participate in software development. I show...