Premium
IS THE GENERAL PUBLIC LICENCE A RATIONAL CHOICE? *
Author(s) -
POLANSKI ARNOLD
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
the journal of industrial economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.93
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1467-6451
pISSN - 0022-1821
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6451.2007.00326.x
Subject(s) - modular design , business , production (economics) , open source , public good , industrial organization , modularity (biology) , commerce , computer science , marketing , microeconomics , economics , operating system , software , biology , genetics
Open source projects are networks of developers, distributors and end‐users of non‐proprietary created knowledge goods. It has been argued that this form of organization has some advantages over the firm or market coordination. I show that for sufficiently convex and modular projects, proprietary licences are not able to sustain sequential knowledge production which, however, can be carried out if the project is run on the open source basis.