Can Open Source projects succeed when the producers are not users? Lessons from the data processing field

Nicolas Jullien, Karine Roudaut
2012 Management international  
Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) proposes an original way to solve the incentive dilemma for the production of information goods, based on von Hippel (1988)'s user-as-innovator principle: as users benefit from innovation, they have incentive to produce it, and as they can expect cumulative innovation on their own proposition, they have incentive to share it. But what is the incentive for producers when they are not users? We discuss this question via a quantitative study of FLOSS
more » ... in "algorithm-based industries". We find that in that case producers hardly participate in such projects. * LUSSI, Institut Télécom Bretagne, M@rsouin. Firstname.name@telecom-bretagne.eu. The authors want to thank Andrea Wiggins et Aimée Johanson who read several versions of this article to check the English with the same constance. These versions are due to the very good reviewing process. Thus our thanks go also to also the two anonymous reviewers who made us considerably improve this article.
doi:10.7202/1012397ar fatcat:5qs7mxyjvrhebcp7iqwvuwu4jq