IT Innovations and Open Source: A Question of Business Ethics or Business Model?

The internet makes data become an increasingly transient good. Almost any song and even entire movies are available in a digital form – not always to the delight of the copyright owners. Another type of good, which can be consid-ered as predestined to be distributed over the channel internet, is software. Vendors use the internet for direct sales purposes as well as for making soft-ware explicitly available free of charge, what offers interested people the pos-sibility to test preliminary software versions (beta versions) and to report possible software errors (bugs) to the vendor. This concept of distributed quality assurance isn’t very innovative. The idea of Open Source even incor-porates the integration of all involved people and all parts of a software product’s lifecycle via an open license model (DiBona et al. 1999, Feller et al. 2005). To put it in a nutshell, the core idea of Open Source is that users do not only participate in the testing process of software but also actively improve the software itself by performing changes on the source code level. To giv