Dual licensing in open source software markets

Comino, Stefano and Manenti, Fabio M. (2007) Dual licensing in open source software markets. UNSPECIFIED.

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    Abstract

    Dual licensing has proved to be a sustainable business model for various commercial software vendors employing open source strategies. In this paper we study the main characteristics of dual licensing and under which conditions it represents a profitable commercial strategy. We show that dual licensing is a form of versioning, whereby the software vendor uses the open source licensing terms in order to induce commercial customers to select the proprietary version of the software. Furthermore, we show that the software vendor prefers dual licensing to a fully proprietary strategy when the customers are very sensitive to the reciprocal terms of the open source license.

    Item Type: Departmental Technical Report
    Department or Research center: Economics
    Subjects: H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5410 Marketing. Distribution of Products
    Uncontrolled Keywords: open source software, dual licensing, copyright, versioning, forking
    Additional Information: Pubblicazione registrata presso il Tribunale di Trento.
    Report Number: 18
    Repository staff approval on: 22 Nov 2007

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