In December 2006, Apache had a market share of 60.64% against 30.67% for its immediate competitor. Linux has already been adopted by approximately 29 millions of users. The market share of the Web browser Firefox is surging despite the pre-existing dominance of Internet Explorer*. Major companies like Oracle have now started providing professional support on Linux. IBM, which had been promoting Linux offerings for years, has strengthened its commitment to openness, making significant investments in the development of communities and creating a broad portfolio of systems adopting open standards and incorporating open-source applications into their design. Sun's Java is open-source. And meanwhile, an increasing number of firms are entering the market by offering open-source-based solutions to their customers, often supplying a mix of proprietary and open solutions through hybrid business models.

It is time to acknowledge the fact that Open-Source software now belongs to the mainstream of the software industry, and that it is rapidly modifying major elements of its industrial organization.

In this context, economists and management scientists are now moving beyond the state of puzzlement that has driven much of the initial attention towards open-source software and related systems.

Located in the context of OSS2007 in order to foster close and fruitful interactions with scholars from various other disciplines and notably with software engineering researchers, this workshop aims at contributing to the current evolutions of the economic and managerial research agendas about open-source software, and thus to provide, first, an assessment of where we - economics and management scholars - are about OSS, and, second, an analysis of the renewed directions in which we should consider inquiring further in the near future, focusing notably on business, production, diffusion and innovation models.

Professor Paul A. David (Stanford University and Oxford Internet Institute) will give a keynote presentation to the workshop.

See the Call for Papers

* To see a wide rage of statistics on OSS adoption and diffusion see David A. Wheeler "Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!" http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html