EVALUATION OF OPEN SOURCE LICENSING MODELS FOR A COMPANY DEVELOPING MASS MARKET SOFTWARE

Open source and free software products have challenged established licensing models for many types of mass mar-ket software products. Especially markets in operating systems, development tools, web servers and databases have significant open source and free software products. A software company that wishes to benefit from the non-technical innovations in open source and free software licenses has to carefully study the markets and character-istics of different open source licensing models. This arti-cle contains a preliminary evaluation of several frequently used open source licenses and licensing models from the perspective of a company developing mass market soft-ware products for competitive markets. Comparing them to commercial licensing models, the article aims to ex-plain when and how open source licenses make economic sense