Licensing schemes in the production and distribution of Open Source software. An empirical investigation

Andrea Bonaccorsi, and Cristina Rossi

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 2003)

A well-known definition accounts for Open Source software: a program is Open Source if its source code is publicly available. Although this characterization encompasses Open Source software, in the following we will clarify that it has a wider scope and fails to define the boundaries of the phenomenon. The best categorisation makes reference to the Open Source Definition (OSD) established by a group of pragmatic Open Source evangelists (Lee, 1999). In the late 1990s they were wondering how to push forward the diffusion of the new paradigm. They aimed in particular at fostering its exploitation by business firms. In order to achieve their goals, in 1998 they established a foundation, the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI elaborated the Open Source Definition that marshals the guidelines to define exactly whether a program is Open Source or not.