The Penguin Has Entered the Building: The Commercialization of Open Source Software Products

Abstract

Previous literature on open source software (OSS) mostly analyzes organizational issues within communities of developers and users. This paper focuses on for-profit organizations that release software products under OSS licenses, and argues that variations in their endowments of intellectual property rights, namely patents and trademarks, help to determine which firms will tend to incorporate OSS into commercial products. We explain whether and under what conditions preexisting stocks of intellectual property rights can be useful complementary assets that allow firms to benefit directly or indirectly from commercializing OSS products, and test our hypotheses on a novel data set built on firms' announcements of OSS product releases in the specialized press between 1995 and 2003. We find three robust results: (a) firms with large stocks of software patents are more likely to release OSS products; (b) firms with large stocks of software trademarks are less likely to release OSS products; (c) firms with large stocks of hardware trademarks are more likely to release OSS products.

The Social Lives of Products:Analyzing Product Demography for Management Theory and Practice

“…As a result, aging products satisfy consumer preferences less well and, therefore, disappear from the market faster than newer products (Greenstein & 8 Wade, 1998;Cottrell & Nault, 2004). The effect of product age on its survival is widely accepted; it is one of few factors consistently controlled for across different product survival studies (de Figueiredo & Kyle, 2006;Fosfuri et al, 2008;Hitsch, 2006;Iizuka, 2007;Khessina & Carroll, 2008;Requena-Silvente & Walker, 2005;2009;Ruebeck, 2002;, Stavins, 1995.…”

“…Empirical studies of product demography using capabilities logic show that higher rates of product introduction run hand in hand with firms holding more patents (de Figueiredo & Kyle, 2006;Fosfuri et al, 2008), firms garnering more product awards (de Figueiredo & Kyle, 2006), firms with newer product lines (Putsis & Bayus, 2001), firms with more experience in related markets and firms diversifying into unrelated markets (Ingram & Roberts, 1999). Capabilities also allow firms to locate their products more strategically in the product space.…”

Coexistence and Market Tipping in a Diffusion Model of Open Source vs. Proprietary Software

“…A large number of case studies has been carried out to explain and empirically ground such a phenomenon. Among the others, topics such as the organization and ethos of the community of developers (Giuri et al, 2010), their motivation to provide code for free (Lerner and Tirole, 2002) and the birth of hybrid business models (Fosfuri et al, 2008) have been extensively examined by different branches of literature.…”

“…Among the others, IBM, Novell and Dell are worth mentioning. This fact has led to the creation of a new type of hybrid business model characterised by the presence of for-profit companies benefiting from OSS solutions, mainly developed by the not-for-profit OSS communities they support (West, 2003 ;Fosfuri et al, 2008). Furthermore, an increasing number of countries all over the world has started discussing about the role OSS should have in public administration.…”

Free software production as critical social practice

“…http://findremix.com/about/ Commercial enterprises can annex and manipulate FOSS projects in which they become involved. Donations of staff time in particular can help to position FOSS developer communities as a firm's 'complementary' (as distinct from its core) assets: when employees can gain access to these communities, they can influence the direction of project development and legitimize the firm's commercial exploitation of project outputs (Dahlander & Wallin, 2006;Fosfuri et al, 2008). The popular image of networked innovation as proceeding from an undifferentiated 'hive mind' is also in tension with the realities of project governance, which as indicated in Part 1 tends to further disintegrate the fragmented labour processes, and mimic the (property-and expertise-based) power structures, characteristic of the post-Fordist enterprise; 31 invariably, too, these structures reflect multiple intersecting social inequalities 32 and often they are held together by a form of charismatic domination (Dafermos, 2012) that is difficult to square with the artistic critique's gospel of liberation.…”