This paper analyzes and compares the investment incentives of platform and application developers for Linux and Windows. We find that the level of investment in applications is larger when the operating system is open source rather than proprietary. The comparison of the levels of investment in...

A major shift toward open source software is underway as companies are more critically evaluating the cost effectiveness of their IT investments, seeing the benefits of collaborative development, and looking for ways to avoid vendor lock-in. At the same time, academics and industry visionaries...

The "community-based" model has generated many of the innovations we use on a daily basis. The social structure created by this model has cultivated many entrepreneurial ventures and even seeded new industries and product categories. The model is based upon the open, voluntary, and collaborative...

The Open Source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful human creative habits into a techno- political movement. This distillation has had costs and benefits. It has been difficult to court mainstream acceptance for such a tangle...

Open source communities are groups of sometimes hundreds if not thousands of individuals with different interests, backgrounds and motives. Many of them are volunteers who are not paid to participate in the communities. Furthermore, many never get to see each other in real life. They meet...

The open source software development model has been hailed as the most significant change in computing since Apple played David to IBM's Goliath. Yet, enterprises dedicated to bringing open source into the mainstream of the information economy have had a rough time finding ways to stay afloat...

Open-source software(OSS) programs (e.g. LINUX, Apache) provide access to the source code to any interested party. This leads to a distributed innovation model where users actively participate in the development of the product. The main purpose of this paper is to help managers who have to...

Open source software development may be superior to proprietary development because the open source organizational form naturally minimizes transactions costs associated with privately distributed information, thereby avoiding certain agency problems. This manifests itself in the ability of open...

Free and open source software (FOSS) is a movement continually gathering accolades as a non-market based system of knowledge production and distribution. This continues even while commercial influences overtake the movement, resulting in many hybrid approaches to software development and...

As the quality of open source software increased dramatically over the last decade and important commercial producers, as IBM, Oracle, Novell and also Microsoft are becoming part of the movement, it is important to review and determine the current state in open source software development. This...