Dual Licensing in Open Source Software Markets

Fabio Manenti (fabio.manenti@unipd.it) and Stefano Comino (stefano.comino@uniud.it)

No 112, "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno"

Abstract: In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commerciaI sustainability of dual licensing, an open source (OS) business strategy that has gained popularity among software vendors. With dual licensing, a firm releases the same software product under both a traditional proprietary license and an open souree one. We show that the decision to employ a dual licensing strategy occurs whenever the feedbacks of the open souree community are valuable enough compared to the quality of the software that the firm is able to develop in-house. Our analysis points to the centraI role of an appropriate managing of OS licenses in order to balance the pros and cons of "going open source" and to make this versioning strategy viable for software vendors; our analysis also suggests a possible explanation for the observed proliferation of open source licenses.

Keywords: open source software; open source business models; embedded software; dual licensing; versioning; license proliferation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D45 L11 L17 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2010-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-tid
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Related works:
Journal Article: Dual licensing in open source software markets (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pad:wpaper:0112

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