The Impact of Community and Commercial Open Source Software on the Quality Strategies of Software Producers

Abstract

This study investigates how open source software can play influences on the quality choices of commercial open source and proprietary software providers. It considers two types of open source software: community open source and commercial open source, and assumes that the usability of commercial open source software is better than community open source substitute but inferior to proprietary substitute. It finds that: (i) the functional quality of proprietary software decreases as the functional quality of community open source software increases, but it may increase as the usability of community open source software increases; (ii) even if commercial open source producers must open the source codes of their quality contributions, they have incentive to enhance the functional quality of community open source software; (iii) the influence of community open source software’s quality (usability or functional quality) or commercial open source software’s usability on the functional quality of commercial open source and proprietary software may be not same; (iv) the appearance of commercial open source software may lead to proprietary software producers lowering their software functional quality.