Proprietary Software and Open Source Philosophy: a shift in software’s production methods

The aim of this paper is to point out that, since the massive growth of Open Source Software (OSS), the production methods of software have changed. The change is not only recognisable within the OSS communities but most evident effects can be also observed in the “proprietary” segment of the market. The data analysis has been performed by allocating a variation towards or away from cooperation/ competition according to the direction of about 12,000 communications, articles and technical notes dated from 1998 up to February 2005. A co-evolution path is identifiable: both the OSS and the proprietary models interchange their original market and production strategies. In the case of the OSS segment, market strategies becomes more business oriented; as a result, systems previously based solely on remote users/producers relations exchange some of the redundancy in its process in favour of a more businessdriven and coordinated production process. On the other hand, proprieta...