Toward a New Industrial Organization? OSS in Economic and Managerial Perspective

At present, an more and more users are running Open Source software (OSS) on their systems. Major companies, like IBM, Oracle, or Sun Microsystems, have now started to make significant investments in developing open communities and creating a portfolio of systems incorporating OSS applications into their design. Meanwhile, an increasing number of firms are entering the market by offering OSS-based solutions to their customers, often supplying a mix of proprietary and open solutions through hybrid business models. In this context, economists and management scientists are now moving beyond the state of puzzlement that has driven much of the initial attention towards OSS. Located in the context of OSS2007 in order to foster close and fruitful interactions with scholars from various other disciplines, this workshop aims at contributing to the current evolutions of the economic and managerial research agendas about OSS, and thus to provide, first, an assessment of where we — economics and management scholars - are about OSS, and, second, an analysis of the renewed directions in which we should consider inquiring further in the near future, focusing notably on business, production, diffusion and innovation models.