Reducing transaction costs in information infrastructures using FLOSS

Firms, or more generally, organizations, develop and become larger along time, using more and more computers to work. This growth in the number of computers leads to a growth of software use (operating systems and their applications, for example) and, as a result, to the growth in the number of software use/access licenses to be purchased and managed. For the owners of software intellectual property rights, this process leads to a greater supervision of users to regulate lawful access to software. The situation occurs when all of the software used by an organization is proprietary. This results in some costs — transaction costs — that are not usually taken into account by administrators and managers. What happens if FLOSS is used? We will show that this choice leads to a reduction in transaction costs in terms of computation costs and in terms of the number of managed contracts, which can be numerically reduced by half