EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Scope of Open Source Licensing

Josh Lerner

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2005, vol. 21, issue 1, 20-56

Abstract: This article is an initial exploration of the determinants of open source license choice. It first highlights how the decision is shaped not just by the preferences of the licensor itself, but also by that of the community of developers. The article then presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of license choice using the SourceForge database, a compilation of nearly 40,000 open source projects. Projects geared toward end-users tend to have restrictive licenses, while those oriented toward developers are less likely to do so. Projects that are designed to run on commercial operating systems and whose primary language is English are less likely to have restrictive licenses. Projects that are likely to be attractive to consumers--such as games--and software developed in a corporate setting are more likely to have restrictive licenses. Projects with unrestricted licenses attract more contributors. These findings are broadly consistent with theoretical predictions. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (70)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewi002 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Scope of Open Source Licensing (2003) Downloads
Working Paper: The Scope of Open Source Licensing (2003) Downloads
Working Paper: The Scope of Open Source Licensing (2002) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:21:y:2005:i:1:p:20-56

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:21:y:2005:i:1:p:20-56