Author(s)
Chaim Fershtman
Source
NET Institute Working Paper #08-01, 2008
Summary
This paper analyzes the virtues and structure of a form of software development: the open source model.
Policy Relevance
Even though open source development is done by unpaid software developers, open source has important collaborative aspects that aid in R&D.
Main Points
- It is not easy to measure the success of open source software.
- One way to measure project success is to examine the number of times a project has been downloaded. This is not an ideal measure, but it is nevertheless used.
- In addition to downloads, there are two main groups of variables used in the analysis: a group of controlled variables and a group of network variables.
- Using the types of variables named above, relationships and correlations can be created that provide hard data that can be used to measure the success of open source software.
- Understanding the variables and the analysis will also help make a more effective open source system.
