Open Source Software: The Success of an Alternative Intellectual Property Incentive Paradigm

Intellectual property protection in the United States is based on an incentive system. The protections provided by intellectual property law are designed to produce economic incentives to "Promote the progress of science and useful arts." The open source software movement, which has gained publicity as the popularity of the Linux operating system has grown, provides an alternative to the economic incentives that dominate the thinking of U.S. intellectual property policy. Product comparisons show that open source software attains high technical standards despite the relative absence of economic motivation for the creators of this software. This technical success is all the more puzzling to the traditional computer community, given the distributed, almost ad hoc, development methodologies employed by the open source movement.