Proprietary versus public domain licensing of software and research products

A Gambardella and Bronwyn Hall

Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley

Abstract: We study the production of knowledge when man), researchers or inventors are involved. in a setting where tensions can arise between individual public and private contributions. We first show that. without some kind of coordination. production of the public knowledge good (science or research software or database) is sub-optimal. Then we demonstrate that if 'lead' researchers are able to establish a norm of contribution to the public good, a better outcome can be achieved, and we show that the general public license (GPL) used in the provision of open source software is one such mechanism. Our results are then applied to the specific setting where the knowledge being produced is software or a database that will be used by academic researchers and possibly by private firms, using as an example a product familiar to economists. econometric software. We conclude by discussing some of the ways in which pricing can ameliorate the problem of providing these products to academic researchers. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Keywords: open source; software; intellectual property; scientific research; databases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-07-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/36w3d20d.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Proprietary versus Public Domain Licensing of Software and Research Products (2010)
Journal Article: Proprietary versus public domain licensing of software and research products (2006)
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:cdl:econwp:qt36w3d20d

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().