[ossig] OSS-Business study conducted in Italy

[Mukhsein Johari <pythonium@yahoo.com>]

Well, continuing my present theme of OSS and business,
here's an study conducted in Italy published on First
Monday:

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_1/bonaccorsi/

Lotsa tables but here are Intro and conclusions - the
last paragraph is telling:

--------------------
Introduction
-------------

A growing body of economic literature is addressing
the issue of incentives for individuals who take part
in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, while
empirical analyses focus on individual developers but
neglect firms that do business with it. During 2002,
we conducted a large-scale survey on 146 Italian firms
supplying OSS in Italy and this paper compares our
data on firms’ motivations with data emerging from
surveys made on individual programmers. Our objective
is to analyse the role played by different classes of
motivations (social, economic and technological) in
determining the involvement of different groups of
agents in Open Source activities.

Conclusions
--------------

For many theoretical reasons, the question of why
people participate in the Open Source movement has
attracted the interest of economists and sociologists
(Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003). Most empirical analyses
have addressed the motivational profile of individual
programmers, while little empirical evidence is
available on firms that base their business models on
Open Source.

We find significant differences between the set of
motivations of individuals and those of firms. In
particular, firms emphasise economic and technological
reasons for entering and contributing to Open Source
and do not subscribe to many social motivations that
are, by contrast, typical of individual programmers.
While one might expect these differences, it is
interesting to observe that the more pragmatic
motivational profiles of firms are accepted in the
Free Software community, provided firms comply with
the rules of the community. This means that the
organisation of Open Source production is robust to a
variety of motivations. Business motivations
apparently do not destroy the community but on the
other hand tend to reinforce it. 

------------------------

I guess it's something most of us already 'know'.
Businesses can do well with OSS if they comply with
the community's 'rules'. You want to make money, sure,
go ahead - but don't break our rules. You play nice,
we play nice - and you'd make a pretty penny. At the
same time, these 'good citizen' companies would
reinforce the community as a whole.

Here I would like to point to examples of SCO (not
playing nice) and Novell and IBM (playing pretty
nice). There are other smaller examples, like that
company taking GPL mplayer and making it proprietary.
And then claiming that GPL is weak and so on - and
then accusing the mplayer developers of stealing
_their_ code. Bad. Bad company:

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/12/228247.shtml?tid=185&tid=188&tid=97

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