Comparative study on innovation incentives for commercial open source software under different licenses

Abstract

This study compares technological innovation incentives for commercial open source software under two typical licenses (the GNU General Public License and the Berkeley Software Distribution License, i.e., GPL and BSD). In the case of private optimum, the incentive towards software features (resp. usability) innovation is always higher (resp. lower) under BSD than under GPL. Contrast to the private optimum, the social planner expects more investment in software feature under both BSD and GPL, but less (resp. equivalent) investment in software usability under BSD (resp. GPL) ©Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.