Open Source Software as Lead User's Make or Buy Decision: A study of Open and Closed Source Quality

Contributions to open source software are motivated by many different incentives, some of which provide the basis of supporting institutions, and others of which help mitigate free-riding. In this paper, I consider the idea that programmers are driven to write software for their own use. Own use as a motivation helps explain patterns of open source founding and participation at the industry level. The analysis also predicts that when open source programs are founded, software quality will surpass that of comparable closed source programs. This quality prediction is tested, and supported, using bug resolution rates as a proxy for quality, or quality improvement. 2Introduction Open source programmers make their software available, free-of-charge, on the Internet. Some firms, like Microsoft, have reacted by dismissing open source as irrelevant; others firms have been surprised, sometimes unpleasantly, by open source quality. For example, open source Apache has, by some accounts, exceeded Netscape among installed web server programs (Netcraft, 2001), and Apple Computer now uses an open source “kernel” in its famously proprietary operating system. The wide variety of reactions that ope