Economic perspectives on open source software. Intellectual property, knowledge-based communities, and the software industry

The Open Source (OS) phenomenon is gaining an increasing economic importance. More and more users are running open programs on their systems, while a remarkable number of software firms have recently entered the market providing to their customers OS-based products and services. These tendencies have attracted the attention of economic scholars, as the very existence of the OS movement challenges the mainstream economic theories. A large body of literature has addressed the incentives of programmers that write code for free within OS projects; their coordination mechanisms; the peculiar management of IPRs; the OS diffusion in presence of dominant proprietary standards; and, more recently, the sustainability of business models based on the new software production paradigm. These important issues are discussed extensively in the three sections of this book, consisting of theoretical and empirical contributions characterised by methodological rigour and high scientific quality. Some of the chapters were presented by their authors during the Lunch Seminars organised by the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale (DIG) of Politecnico di Milano, and benefited from comments and suggestions from the participants. This volume is the second of an ongoing series that aims at handing down to the readers the wealth of theoretical and empirical contributions stemming from DIG Lunch Seminars. I am confident that this could be a way for moving forward knowledge on relevant issues of the modern economic systems.