From: Jonathan Gray jonathan.gray@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