Economics approaching OSS: reviewing 15 years of debate

The work aims at reviewing the theoretical literature on the development and diffusion of Open Source Software (OSS) relevant to an economic approach. It provides a synthetic picture of the areas of economic analysis for OSS, by attempting to frame relevant research efforts into a taxonomy based on attributes of innovation and process of diffusion. The main contributions investigating in the past decade the economic theoretical models beyond the “open” way of producing and distributing software goods analyse: i) its supposed nature of complex public good, ii) the production process and distributed work organisation, iii) the evaluation of its impact on the software market, both at market level and at firm level. The relationship of the open source model with knowledge appropriation and reuse, and with innovation diffusion to support economic growth and social wealth would help drawing related economics and policy issues.