Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact on social welfare of public policies supporting open source software (OSS). The focus of the paper is on desktop applications such as OpenOce and Linux for desktops. Desktop users can be divided between those who know about the existence of OSS, the “informed” adopters, and the “uninformed” ones; the presence of uniformed users leads to market failures that may justify government intervention. We study three policies: i) mandatory adoption, when government forces public agencies, schools and universities to adopt OSS, ii) information campaign, when the government informs the uninformed users about the existence and the characteristics of OSS, and iii) subsidization, when consumers are payed a subsidy when adopting OSS. We show that a part from subsidization policies, which have been proved to harm social surplus, supporting OSS through mandatory adoption and information campaign may have positive welfare eects. When software adoption is aected by strong net
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