Thanks to a recent and vast empirical literature, we know in details how the most popular open source projects are organized and why they succeed. However open source is not only Linux: in this paper we use a large data-set obtained from SourceForge.net to estimate the main determinants of the...

Governments’ interest in Free/Open Source (F/OS) software is steadily increasing. Several policies aimed at supporting Free/Open Source (F/OS) software have been taken or are currently under discussion all around the world. In this paper, we review the basic (economic) rationales for such...

The theoretical literature on the cumulative innovation process has emphasized the role of ex-ante licensing – namely, licensing agreements negotiated before the follow-on innovator has sunk its R&D investment – in mitigating the risk of hold-up of future innovations. In this paper, we...

In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commercial sustainability of dual licensing, an open source (OS) business strategy that has gained popularity among software vendors. With dual licensing, a firm releases the same software product under both a...

software involved. We provide empirical evidence that F/OSS support is stronger in countries i) where e-government services are more largely available, and ii) where the domestic software industry is lagging behind. This evidence supports common views among F/OSS advocates.

In this paper, we prove that two firms may prefer not to include a termination clause in their partnership contract, thus inducing a costly termination in case of failure of the joint project. This ex-post inefficiency induces partners to exert large levels of non-contractible efforts...

In the paper we analyze how the possibility of revealing information to a competitor alters the entry/investment behavior of a first entrant. We show that once it has entered the market, the firm might refrain from making further profitable investments in order to hide information from the...

This paper analyses the impact of public policies supporting open source software (OSS). Users can be divided between those who know about the existence of OSS, the "informed" adopters, and the "uninformed" ones; the presence of uniformed users yields to market failures that justify government...