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Posts Tagged ‘Proprietary software’

Public and private provision of public and private goods

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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Competition from open source software improves social welfare

October 31, 2008 Leave a comment

I show in a new paper that open source software, when it competes with proprietary software, makes software users better off than proprietary software alone could. Conversely, proprietary software, by competing with open source software, guarantees better social outcomes than if open source existed alone. 

The paper is available at SSRN and RePEc.

Why Open Source Source Does Not Succeed

February 15, 2008 Leave a comment
Competition with proprietary software encourages open source developers to respond to users’ needs. Open source developer with pragmatic motivations will prefer the BSD, while those with ideological motivations will prefer the GPL. Copycat OS software is unlikely to be compatible with proprietary software, but more likely to have user interfaces than innovative OS software. 

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