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Nathan Schneider (ntnsndr@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 11:01:35 JST Nathan Schneider
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- Strypey
@strypey Where is the contradictory evidence? Not a rhetorical question! I haven't studied this in depth, but the main paper I know about that studied this supports the less restrictive camp: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10368-007-0086-4
In conversation about 3 days ago from social.coop permalink
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  Open source software: Motivation and restrictive licensing - International Economics and Economic Policy
  
  from Gandal, Neil
  
  Open source software (OSS) is an economic paradox. Development of open source software is often done by unpaid volunteers and the “source code” is typically freely available. Surveys suggest that status, signaling, and intrinsic motivations play an important role in inducing developers to invest effort. Contribution to an OSS project is rewarded by adding one’s name to the list of contributors which is publicly observable. Such incentives imply that programmers may have little incentive to contribute beyond the threshold level required for being listed as a contributor. Using a unique data set we empirically examine this hypothesis. We find that the output per contributor in open source projects is much higher when licenses are less restrictive and more commercially oriented. These results indeed suggest a status, signaling, or intrinsic motivation for participation in OSS projects with restrictive licenses.
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  Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 11:01:36 JST Strypey
  
  There's this weird dogma among BSD partisans, which says that more "permissive" licenses make software companies more likely to support Free Code development, and pass on the benefits they receive from that license to their "end users". 25 years of contradictory evidence, that what they actually do is parasitically build proprietary software around the ongoing work of Open Source communities, has done nothing to dispel this myth.
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  In conversation about 3 days ago permalink

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