Free, libre or open source software (FLOSS) is nowadays produced not only by individual benevolent developers but, in a growing proportion, by firms that hire programmers for their own objectives of development in open source or for contributing to open source projects in the context of...

The participation of firms in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities is growing and is increasingly debated among scholars. As Ousterhout (1999) explained, “FLOSS needs profit” and we do not know of any successful FLOSS products without firms in their ecosystem, either through...

This paper sheds new light on the economic logic of voluntary associations and the relationship between individual contribution and collective action. The aims are twofold.Firstly, we seek to explain how “team reasoning” (Bacharach et al. 2006) can deeply change the functioning of voluntary...

Jamendo is a website for the legal, free downloading of music. This platform of “free” online music, the biggest in the world, operates on the basis of Creative Commons licences. The survey presented here was carried out on a sample of 767 artists (solo musicians or groups) who are members...

The concept of diffusion is central to every social system, because it underpins the coherence of individuals' behaviour and representations, and hence the coordination of their actions. The idea at the origin of the concept of diffusion is that inter-individual interactions are the driving...

In this paper we model the formation of innovation networks as they emerge from bilateral decisions. In contrast to much of the literature, here firms only consider knowledge production, and not network issues when deciding on partners. Thus we focus attention on the effects of the knowledge and...

This paper aims at investigating the process of involvement in open online communities producing knowledge, via the link between the first contribution and the level of contribution reached. While most studies look at the career of contribution after the first contribution, we focus on what...

We discuss, from a case study, GeoRezo, the involvement and the evolution of participants in on-line communities of practice. This “career” is analyzed from two points: the factors facilitating role endorsement; the reasons for such involvement