Contrary to what most people assume, Open Source doesn't just mean access to the source code. A software is considered … data on licensors, that is on firms producing and distributing software on an Open Source basis. This study addresses his … March 2003 we conducted a survey on Italian firms that do business with Open Source software. We asked them to indicate the …

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software … software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged …

During the '60s and the '70s, basically all software was Open Source and everyone was allowed to copy, modify and … redistribute computer programs. When software ceased to be hardware-specific and the diffusion of computers took off, firms started … to produce software independently from hardware and to protect their code through intellectual property rights. At …