Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

This research project aims to analyse some crucial issues on the economics and management of open source software from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Several recent works have studied the Open Source Software phenomenon focusing on different issues: the incentives to develop software without monetary compensation, the heterogeneity of users preferences that induce their involvement in the innovation process, the competition between OSS and proprietary software, the business models for making profits from open source software (see, for example, Lerner and Tirole, 2000; Lakhani and von Hippel, 2000; Franke and von Hippel, 2002).These studies point out different reasons for the rising diffusion of OSS products. Our work focuses on the incentives and organisation of different agents involved in the development of OSS -academic institutions, communities of hackers, commercial developers, pure distributors and, more recently, established proprietary software firms.These agents contribute to technical progress and diffusion of OSS in various ways. They show different strategies - from vertical integration to specialisation in specific activities such as development of core products (e.g., kernels), packaging and commercial distribution of legacy OSS products (e.g., Linux and Sendmail).The research also aims to provide empirical analysis on the competition between open source and proprietary software in the main segments of the market and to build a framework for the detailed analysis of the licensing models characterising the open source and proprietary ways of software distribution.

Salvatore Torrisi, University of Camerino, Italia

Paola Giuri, Gaia Rocchetti; Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

December 2001 - June 2002