Open-Source Software Development and Distributed Innovation

Abstract

Abstract The central economic question posed by the Internet is how commercial investments can appropriate value from a public good called information. Information can be transported and replicated at essentially zero marginal cost and its use by one party does not preclude use by another. Since information is digitally encoded, its provision is the service that is facilitated by the Internet. Internet companies seek to collect fees and payment on information services. The difficulty in finding mechanisms to extract payments on the provision of a public good explains, to a large extent, the high death rate among Internet ventures.