Why do commercial companies contribute to open source software?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link belowMany researchers have pointed out that the opensource movement is an interesting phenomenon that is difficult to explain with conventional economic theories. However, while there is no shortage on research on individuals’ motivation for contributing to opensource, few have investigated the commercial companies’ motivations for doing the same. A case study was conducted at three different companies from the IT service industry, to investigate three possible drivers: sale of complimentary services, innovation and open sourcing (outsourcing). We offer three conclusions. First, we identified three main drivers for contributing to opensource, which are (a) selling complimentary services, (b) building greater innovative capability and (c) cost reduction through open sourcing to an external community. Second, while previous research has documented that the most important driver is selling complimentary services, we found that this picture is too simple. Our evidence points to a broader set of motivations, in the sense that all our cases exhibit combinations of the three drivers. Finally, our findings suggest that there might be a shift in how commercial companies view opensource software. The companies interviewed have all expressed a moral obligation to contribute to open source

The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System

Richard Stallman will speak about the purpose, goals, philosophy, methods, status, and future prospects of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by an estimated 17 to 20 million users world wide.BiographyRichard Stallman is the founder of the Gnu Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for ''GNU's Not Unix''), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be some 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems today. Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project. Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the royal institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski award. In 2001 he received a second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared the Takeda award for social/economic betterment with Torvalds and Ken Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering

SPIM S20: A MIPS R2000 simulator.

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