The Penguin Has Entered the Building: The Commercialization of Open Source Software Products
Open accessAbstract
Previous literature on open source software (OSS) mostly analyzes organizational issues within communities of developers and users. This paper focuses on for-profit organizations that release software products under OSS licenses, and argues that variations in their endowments of intellectual property rights, namely patents and trademarks, help to determine which firms will tend to incorporate OSS into commercial products. We explain whether and under what conditions preexisting stocks of intellectual property rights can be useful complementary assets that allow firms to benefit directly or indirectly from commercializing OSS products, and test our hypotheses on a novel data set built on firms' announcements of OSS product releases in the specialized press between 1995 and 2003. We find three robust results: (a) firms with large stocks of software patents are more likely to release OSS products; (b) firms with large stocks of software trademarks are less likely to release OSS products; (c) firms with large stocks of hardware trademarks are more likely to release OSS products.
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Wikipedia, Couchsurfing, and Linux have recently received fair amounts of cynical responses from digital commoners.
“Additionally, self-professed promoters of the peer-to-peer economy of the digital commons, Wikipedia and Couchsurfing, as well as champions of the open-source movement like Linux have recently received fair amounts of cynical responses from digital commoners (Fosfuri et al., 2008; Greenstein and Zhu, 2012; Molz, 2012).”
From The illusion of the digital commons: 'False consciousness' in online alternative economies (2017) · cites this paper as Fosfuri et al., 2008
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 59 · Cited by 229
- Authors
- Fosfuri, A., Giarratana, M. S., & Luzzi, A.
- Affiliations
- Department of Business Administration, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28903 Getafe, Madrid, Spain
- Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (ES)
- ORCID
- Giarratana, Marco S.
- Venue
- Organization Science
- Published
- 2008-04
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 292-305
- ISSN
- 1047-7039 (ISSN-L)
- 1526-5455
- OpenAlex
- W2128539546
- Cited by
- 229
- References
- 59
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 57.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- Locations
- Organization Science (publishedVersion)
- LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- e-Archivo (Carlos III University of Madrid) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Archivio istituzionale della Ricerca - Bocconi (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Harvard Business School
- Fundación Ramón Areces
- London School of Economics and Political Science
- Copenhagen Business School
- Università Bocconi
- Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management of Technology and Innovation › Intellectual Property and Patents
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Digital Platforms and Economics
- Keywords
- open source software, software patents, intellectual property, complementary assets, for-profit corporations
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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