From: Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray(a)okfn.org>
Date: 2013/4/29
Subject: [okfn-discuss] The role of open licensing in large
collaborative projects?
Out of interest does anyone know of any research or case studies
looking at the role of open licensing in collaborative projects and
how open licensing enables/facilities collaboration?
E.g. in open content projects like Wikipedia, open data projects like
Open Street Map, or in open access research projects like the Human
Genome Project? Or - even more generally - in free/open source
software projects?
There's quite a lot of work studying the effects of licensing in free/libre open
source software. You can find a number of papers on
http://flosshub.org/biblio (search for
license) and some of the work is summarized in review articles on FLOSS (e.g., [1]). The
findings are mixed: some studies found that more restrictive licenses (i.e., GPL) led to
more project popularity but others that less restrictive licenses (e.g., BSD) led to
higher developer productivity. Some of the effects may be spurious, e.g., it could be that
some project characteristics affect both productivity and choice of license.
[1] Crowston, K., Wei K., Howison J., & Wiggins A. (2012). Free/Libre Open Source
Software Development: What we know and what we do not know. ACM Computing Surveys. 44.
DOI 10.1145/2089125.2089127
Kevin Crowston
Syracuse University Phone: +1 (315) 443-1676
School of Information Studies Fax: +1 (815) 550-2155
348 Hinds Hall Web:
http://crowston.syr.edu/
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA