Research identifies benefits of the open source software market
A forthcoming paper in Marketing Science by Columbia Business School Class of 1967 Associate Professor of Business, Brett Gordon, in collaboration with Vineet Kumar, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Kannan Srinivasan, Heinz College Professor of Management, Marketing and Information Systems at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, finds that commercial open source software (COSS) results in high-quality products, and that despite the free-riding that is inherent in the industry due to information-sharing, the market creates spillover benefits for both consumers and producers. The study features a two-sided model of competition between commercial open source software (COSS) firms, which allows the research to determine the benefits of COSS.