A Case Study of the Collaborative Approaches to Sustain Open Source Business Models

Shane Coughlan; Tetsuo Noda; Terutaka Tansho

Open source licenses provide everyone with the legal right to use, study, share, and improve the technology they cover from the perspective of copyright law. However, there are occasions when open source software packages or projects primarily governed by copyright licenses come into potential conflict with patent issues, or suffer from other governance concerns regarding third-party Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). From an economic perspective it is interesting how instead of undermining adoption, such challenges have led to an increase of collaborative governance solutions in open source, perhaps inspired by how such collaboration in development and business matters has provided benefit to stakeholders. In this paper, we explore the evolution of collaborative solutions in open source business by examining actual using real world examples, and in the process illustrate how this unique approach to dealing with diverse ownership across business sectors works in practice.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.