TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gambardella,Alfonso
AU  - Hall,Bronwyn H.
TI  - Proprietary vs. Public Domain Licensing of Software and Research Products
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11120
PY  - 2005
Y2  - February 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11120
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11120.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alfonso Gambardella
Department of Management and KITeS
Bocconi University
Via Roentgen 1
20136 Milan
Italy
Tel: +39-02-58363706
Fax: +39-02-58363391
E-Mail: alfonso.gambardella@unibocconi.it

Bronwyn H. Hall
Dept. of Economics
549 Evans Hall
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/642-3878
Fax: 510/548-5561
E-Mail: bhhall@nber.org
AB  - We study the production of knowledge when many researchers or inventors are involved, in a setting where tensions can arise between individual public and private contributions. We first show that without some kind of coordination, production of the public knowledge good (science or research software or database) is sub-optimal. Then we demonstrate that if "lead" researchers are able to establish a norm of contribution to the public good, a better outcome can be achieved, and we show that the General Public License (GPL) used in the provision of open source software is one of such mechanisms. Our results are then applied to the specific setting where the knowledge being produced is software or a database that will be used by academic researchers and possibly by private firms, using as an example a product familiar to economists, econometric software. We conclude by discussing some of the ways in which pricing can ameliorate the problem of providing these products to academic researchers.
ER  -