Some Simple Economics of Open Source

By Josh Lerner, Jean Tirole. 2003

391 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on career concerns,' can explain many of these projects' features. Aspects of the future of open source development process, however, remain somewhat difficult to predict with off-the-shelf' economic models.

Subfields: Accounting, Computer Science Applications, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42a9f79fe28606e747723125bf1cb725d8b0d030

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In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

The Dynamics of Open Strategy: From Adoption to Reversion (2017, positive): “…in the competencies accumulated by the cooperating ﬁ rms. Prior research has observed that open innovation is leading to new empirical phenomena that do not ﬁ t well with Por-terian theories of business strategy (Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007; Lerner and Tirole, 2002; West and Gallagher, 2006).”
Crowdsourcing: What can be Outsourced to the Crowd, and Why ? (2009, positive): “such ego gratification, peer recognition or skill signaling (von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003; Lerner and Tirole, 2002 ).”
Open Source Software and the "Private-Collective" Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science (2003, positive): “As Lerner and Tirole (2000) and von Krogh (2002) observe, adequate rewards can be provided to participants in open source software projects in a variety of forms, including elevated reputations, expected reciprocity, and incentives to help build a community.”
Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects (2009, neutral): “Motives to Participate in Open Source Software Projects Motives to participate related literature Software use value [20, 25, 35, 49, 55, 60, 63, 65] Status and recognition [25, 28, 35, 47, 49, 55, 63] Learning [25, 26, 28, 61, 63, 65] Personal enjoyment [25, 28, 49, 55, 65] Reciprocity [25, 35, 55]”
Impacts of License Choice and Organizational Sponsorship on User Interest and Development Activity in Open Source Software Projects (2006, positive): “We used the definitions and categorization provided by Lerner and Tirole (2005) to determine whether a project had a nonrestrictive or a restrictive license.”
Economics and Electronic Commerce: Survey and Directions for Research (2001, neutral): “(For another interpretation of the growth and diffusion of open-source software, see Lerner and Tirole [255].”
Breaking Monotony with Meaning: Motivation in Crowdsourcing Markets (2012, neutral): “code for free in open-source communities in order to satisfy an “ego-gratification incentive” or to signal ability to potential employers (Lerner and Tirole, 2002).”
Open Innovation in a dynamic cournot duopoly (2014, neutral): “The adjoint equations and transversality conditions for the costates μij are: { μ̇ii(t) = βi(t) + λii(t)kj(t) + (ρ+ η)μii(t) limt→+∞ e μii(t)βi(t) = 0 , (20)  μ̇ij(t) = λij(t)kj(t) + (ρ+ η)μij limt→+∞ e μij(t)βj(t) = 0 .”
Entry Strategies Under Competing Standards: Hybrid Business Models in the Open Source Software Industry (2006, neutral): “software-related services ( Lerner and Tirole, 2002a, 2002b; Hecker, 2000).”
Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Contributor's Perspective (2014, neutral): “Contributor motivation is a well explored research topic [35, 56, 34, 46, 2].”