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

This paper investigates competition between open source and proprietary software. Open source software is divided into two types: free open source and commercial open source. Free open source software can be available from the not-for-profit community, and Commercial open source software is software product based on free open source software. The usability of both free and commercial open source software is assumed to be inferior to proprietary software. It finds that: (i) when commercial open source vendor faces competition from proprietary software and free open source software, it may still be able to obtain profits; (ii) commercial open source vendor's pricing (resp. share or profit) may still be much lower (resp. less) than that of proprietary vendor even if its software functionality is not inferior to proprietary software; (iii) commercial open source vendor's pricing and profit may not increase as its software usability increases; (iv) proprietary software's price decreases with the usability of commercial open source software. Index Terms—proprietary software, open source software, price competition, software features, software usability

There are two puzzles in the software competition literature: whether both proprietary and open source software will survive and how producers of proprietary software differentiate themselves from open source competition. I address both puzzles by analyzing competition between a firm producing proprietary software and a community producing open source software. If the firm faces no competition, then the software caters to less technologically savvy individuals. When facing competition, the open source software caters to the most technologically savvy individuals, leading the firm to target even less savvy individuals than it would when acting as a monopolist in order to differentiate its software from the open source option. The open source movement, then, may not be an unalloyed success as the growth in open source can be tied to deterioration in the proprietary software. Given that both types of software survive by catering to different segments of the market, an important avenue for research will be to analyze the stability of the underlying segments and the corresponding welfare implications.

Methodology for Public Administrators for selecting between open source and proprietary software

Open-source software abbreviated as OSS is computer software that is available with source code and is provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software. For the commercial software the source code and certain other rights are normally reserved for copyright holders,i.e. the company who developes the software. A group of people in a collaborative manner often developes the Open source software, not under the roof of a large organization. This strategy makes open source software cheap, reliable and modifiable if needed. In this context we shall discuss mainly the features of Open Source Software, differences of open source and free software and open source software movement in Indian perspective.

Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse

Purpose: A growing number of commercial open source software, based on free open source software, appears in many segments of software market. The purpose of this study is to investigate how commercial open source software affects proprietary software producer’s pricing (market share or profit), consumer surplus and social welfare. Design/methodology: To analyze the impact of commercial open source software on proprietary software producer, this study constructs two vertical-differentiation models: the basic model considers proprietary software only competing with free open source software, and its extended one considers proprietary software competing with both free and commercial open source software. Findings: This study mainly finds that the presence of commercial open source software leads to the software price and profit for proprietary software producer decrease and the consumer surplus and social welfare increase. However, it does not necessarily cause the decline in the market share for proprietary software producer. Originality/value: The main contribution of this study is to examine the effect of commercial open source software on proprietary software producer’s competitive strategy, consumer surplus and social welfare.

Embedded industries have invested a lot in the introduction of software product lines in their software development. In addition, using open source software appears to be a profitable way to obtain good software. This is also applicable for organizations doing product line engineering. On the other hand, because of the diverse use of open source software, product line development is an attractive way of working in open source communities. In fact, the configuration mechanisms used in open source communities may be applicable within software product lines as well. In addition, product line organisations are usually involved in distributed development, which works very efficiently within open source communities. However, at present, there is limited interaction between the open source and product line development communities. The aim for the workshop is to explore what the two communities can learn from each other and to develop a better understanding of how the two communities can benefit from each other. The workshop deals with the following issues: Community: Ownership, control and management of product line assets in an open source community Visibility of the code: when it is valuable to share proprietary code and how to take the right decision. Architecture Views: Creation of different levels of architecture visibility: proprietary, among closed consortium, public. Is this possible? Product line requirements roadmaps and planning in open source development Variability management: Using the open source community to evolve components and being explicit about variability Variability representation: in an open source community Deployment: Open source for the platform and in applications Heterogeneous processes: Cohabitation of product line management and agile processes Tools: Open source asset management tools in product line development Domain and application engineering and their meaning in an open source context Recovery and recognition of a product line in an open source asset base Legal: Aspects dealing with evolutionary, variability or distribution of development relating to legal risks involving: liability, warranties, patent infringements etc. KeywordsProduct LineOpen SourceOpen Source SoftwareSoftware Product LineOpen Source CommunityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to educate the knowledge worker on the benefits of using open source software, and to demonstrate how open source methodology promotes the collaborative and innovative attributes of knowledge management.Design/methodology/approachThe author lists the open source initiative's definition for open source products, licensing information, the value of open source in a global economy, misconceived barriers to open source adoption, a functional comparison of open source and commercial software products, and web sites where open source products may be obtained.FindingsOpen source usage is prevalent throughout the world for governmental, business, educational, military, and space exploration purposes. Notwithstanding, some commercial enterprises such as the Microsoft Corporation have viewed the open source movement as a threat to profitability, citing alleged intellectual property infringement violations. However, other commercial entities such as IBM, Oracle, Novell, and Apple computer have embraced open source technology to conduct business operations as well as satisfy customer needs. Public appeal for open source products has been strong enough for Microsoft, through a recent public statement, to disclose that the firm wishes to “build a bridge” with the open source community, an apparent realization that open source is here to stay. The knowledge worker should understand that commercial and open source applications may coexist in the same IT environment.Originality/valueA knowledge enterprise's total cost of ownership (TCO) can be significantly reduced through the use of open source software, resulting in an improvement to overall performance attributed to the collaborative and innovative nature of the open source model. Enterprises can benefit by taking a closer look at how open source technology helps to meet organizational goals and objectives in the most efficient and effective manner available.

By modifying Hotelling model, we research the differentiation decisions between open source software (OSS) and proprietary software (PS) and the location decisions of proprietary software when open source software and proprietary software coexist in a software market. In this paper, we assume proprietary software producer pursues profit maximization and open source software is freely available. The study finds that: (i) Higher (resp. lower) the OSS's learning cost, smaller (resp. greeter) the software differentiation between OSS and PS; (ii) the compatibility degree between open source and proprietary software affects software differentiation; (iii) how the network externality and OSS user's software development skills affect the software differentiation decisions and the location decisions of proprietary software depends on the compatibility degree between PS and OSS.

On the middle ground between open source and commercial software - the case of the Newbler program

Abstract. Open source software could emerge thanks to the development of the Internet, development tools, and computer literacy in general. The most attractive parameter of open source GIS software is a free license. The rapid pace of development, attracting developers from all over the world and high modularity stimulate the innovative nature of open source software. Here, the introduction of new technologies does not meet with opposition, but rather welcomes. These circumstances, as well as elucidation of the functional capabilities of such GIS, become very important in the search for means of providing the educational process with modern GIS software, which is traditionally an expensive proprietary software. Goal: Analysis of up-to-date GIS software protection and visual accessibility of the QGIS system in the first place with studying geoinformation systems.Quantum GIS (QGIS) is an open source software (GIS) geographic information system (GIS). Open software is one of the most interesting technological phenomena of the present, owing to its rapid growth in the development of the Internet, development tools and computer literacy in general. The key role in the creation, development and support of open source software is played, as a rule, by the community of developers forming around individual software products: commercial companies, groups of enthusiasts or research organizations. The term open source was proposed by Bruce Perens, one of the key leaders in the Open Source and Free Software movement, cofounder with Eric Raymind in 1998 of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an open source software development organization that promotes and provides technical open source support. This open source term is used by OSI to determine whether a software license complies with open source standards. The main features of open source software as defined include free distribution, accessible source code, permission to modify this source code. At the same time, even successful open source software products require companies on the market ready to provide technical support and advice on issues related to the selected products. However, the number of companies providing support services for open source GIS software is still relatively small.

Is Open Source About Innovation? How Interactions with the Open Source Community Impact on the Innovative Performances of Entrepreneurial Ventures

This dissertation contains three essays on the study of open source software collaboration. The first essay, titled “Overview of Open Source Software Development”, highlights the link between developer incentives under the non-monetary setting and the sustainability issue in the open source community. Motivated by the well-known fatalflaw Heartbleed in the widely used open source network security framework OpenSSL, Chapter 1 discusses the lack of manpower in the open source community from theperspective of developer incentives. I introduce the empirical setting of this project, GitHub, one the most popular open source development platforms. Both the past literatureas well as the social network features on GitHub suggest that the motivations to contribute to open source projects could include (but not limited to) ego stratification,reputation, and career concern. The second Chapter, “An Empirical Case Study of Open Source Software Community”, provides descriptive statistics of the contribution history data for Python projects from GitHub, and establishes several empirical patterns of open source contribution to showcase the lack of manpower in the community. I find that the distribution of contribution of a project follows power law, in the sense that most projects have very few contributors and number of commits while very few projects have a large number of contributors and commits. In addition, the number of new contributors ofa project is positively correlated with its current number of authors and watchers at first, then negatively correlated. For the number of commits, the opposite holds true. In the last Chapter, titled “A Structural Model of Decentralized Open Source Software Development”, I build a dynamic discrete choice model characterizing individual developer choice problem in order to understand the sustainability issue in the open source community. Using finite-dependence (Arcidiacono and Miller, 2011, 2019b,a), 1 I identify and estimate the parameters of an individual developer’s utility function. The estimation results show that developers prefer to contribute to popular projects. At the same time, they prefer their own contribution to not be “diluted” by theirpeers. This is the first study, to the extent of my knowledge, to build and estimate a structural model to build a direct link between developer preferences and the choice of open source contribution. Lastly, given the estimated structural parameters, I conduct counterfactual analysis by increasing the expected popularity of projects except for new projects. The results show that the number of contributors choosing not to commit would decrease under the counterfactual regime.

By extending Hotelling game model, this paper explores compatible strategies between open source software (OSS) and proprietary software (PS). In this paper, we assume that PS producer aims at profit maximization, OSS producer pursues market share maximization and software user's expectations on network size may be fulfilled or myopic. For each type of user expectation, we study both cases of market fully covered and partly covered. The main findings are following: (i) in the case of myopic expectation, both OSS and PS producers choose maximum compatible degree in equilibrium. This conclusion is true in both fully covered and partly covered markets; (ii) in the case of fulfilled expectation, equilibrium compatible strategies depend on market coverage. When the market is partly covered, both OSS and PS producers choose maximum compatible degree in equilibrium. But when the market is fully covered, PS producer may choose maximum compatible degree or incompatibility as its equilibrium strategy (The choice depends on the learning (maintenance or development) cost of OSS, user's software development capacity and network externality); (iii) how the competitive strategies of OSS and PS producers are affected by the rival's compatible degree may be different in different user expectations (or market coverage).

Open Source Software is a solution possibility for all customers seeking a higher degree of robustness from delivered software. Open source also opens new ground for software development houses and other IT shops. New business models that range from support services to pure product development now consider open source a key component of their core business plan. This has led to interesting relationships between open source communities and vendors who must co-exist for each otherpsilas survival. In this paper we share a case study experience of a relatively small software development and support shop whose business model relies on open source software. This experience describes the advantages and disadvantages, discussing the blending of business objectives, cultures, people, and software practices across an open source community and software vendor. Lessons learned and perspectives on how such arrangements may fail or succeed are shared.