Call for Papers – Fourth FLOSS Workshop

The Fourth FLOSS Workshop will take place in Jena (Germany) on July 1 and 2, 2010. The theme of the workshop will be “Business models, social networks and collaborative knowledge development”.

The call for papers is available at http://floss2010.pbworks.com, and can be downloaded at http://floss2010.pbworks.com/f/Call+for+Papers.pdf.

Two special guests will give introductory lectures about their research in that domain: Jürgen Bitzer will present his research on “Returns to Open Source Software Engagement: An Empirical Test of the Signaling Hypothesis”, and Rebeca Méndez-Durón will present her paper “Returns from Social Capital in Open Source Software Networks”.

Information about Jena is available on the workshop’s website (links at the top). Jena is a very pleasant and very old university town in what used to be East Germany. It is very well linked by high-speed trains from Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.

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Public and private provision of public and private goods

Public and private provision of public and private goods. Presentation made on August 26th, 2009 at the 24th Congress of the European Economic Association in Barcelona, of the paper entitled “Consumer Welfare and Market Structure in a Model of Competition between Open Source and Proprietary Software“.

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Open source software and innovation

Open source software and innovation. Presentation made on August 3, 2009 at the 3rd Jena Summer Academy on “Innovation and Uncertainty”. How much innovation is there in open source software? How efficient is the open-source development model? Could open source software be a threat to innovation, or does it rather support and accelerate proprietary innovation?

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OS Developers Care About Competition: The Case of LaTeX

Image via Wikipedia

Developed over three decades, the open source LaTeX typesetting software came into competition with a variety of open source and proprietary alternatives. This case study shows that OS developers are concerned about users’ needs and this motivates them to attract users by competing with proprietary software in terms of usability. 

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