 Impact of license choice on Open Source Software development activityJorge Colazo and Yulin Fang Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009, vol. 60, issue 5, 997-1011 Abstract: The Open Source Software (OSS) development model has emerged as an important competing paradigm to proprietary alternatives; however, insufficient research exists to understand the influence of some OSS project characteristics on the level of activity of the development process. A basic such characteristic is the selection of the project's software license. Drawing upon social movement theory, our study examined the relationship between OSS licenses and project activity. Some OSS licenses include a “copyleft” clause, which requires that if derivative products are to be released, it must be done under the license the original product had. We hypothesize that copylefted licenses, as opposed to noncopylefted licenses, are associated with higher developer membership and coding activity, faster development speed, and longer developer permanence in the project. To test the hypotheses, we used archival data sources of working OSS projects spanning several years of development time. We discuss practical and theoretical implications of the results as well as future research ideas. Date: 2009 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:60:y:2009:i:5:p:997-1011 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology |
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