Abstract

 Edwards, Kasper    Software licensing   

Software licensing

Abstract

Governments spend large amounts of money buying software some of which are custom made. Little effort has gone into to determine what license yields the greatest return for society, for a given type of software. Historically the BSD type licenses have been used in the USA with benefit for businesses. This presentation illustrates how three different licenses i.e. MS EULA, GPL and BSD has consequences for incentives for both private agents and firms. Using a model for (open source) software development and consumption it is explained just how the three licenses induce different behavior. Firms and governments can use this understanding when buying or producing software for choosing the optima license for a given situation. Clearly, forms and governments have different objectives but they both need a tool for analyzing consequences of different licensing choices and choose the optimal for the given situation. The model developed is qualitative and draws from the literature of open source software and economics. The model operates at the level of the developer/firm and the software project and shed light on the relationship between the maintainer and the user/developers.