Proprietary Software, Free and Open-Source Software, and Piracy: An Economic Analysis : A theoretical approach to competition between free and non-free software in the presence of unauthorised copying and network externalities
Journal: Duo Research Archive (University of Oslo)
Year: 2012

This thesis aims to analyse the impact of software piracy on competition between a non-free proprietary type of software and a free/open-source type of software. \n\nIn pursuing this, I use a model inspired by Besley et al. (2010) originally applied to describe voting behaviour in political elections. In the benchmark model with no piracy there are two types of software: one free (e.g. open-source) and one non-free type (i.e. proprietary). I show that under certain conditions the proprietary sof