Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Competition between Commercial Open Source Software Firms under the GNU General Public License
Mingqing Xing
Department of Economics and Management, Weifang University, Weifang 261061, China
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2013 23:5408-5412
Received: November 24, 2012 | Accepted: January 17, 2013 | Published: May 28, 2013
Abstract
This study compares R&D incentives for commercial open source software (COSS) firms under the GNU General Public License (i.e., GPL). It is found that: (i) although the GPL requires firms open the codes of features, firms have incentives to invest in software features under private optimum; (ii) the firm with high software usability has much higher incentive to invest in software features, sets higher price, obtains more market share and profit than the one with low software usability does; (iii) firms invest too little in software features under GPL from a public policy perspective.
Keywords:
Commercial open source software, competition, R&D, general public license, software features, software usability,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
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