THE ECONOMY OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE: REASONS THAT LEAD SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE COMMUNITIES

ABSTRACT Currently the software development is one of the most lucrative economic activities. Great wealth and large corporations, as the Microsoft, were built through the proprietary software development and commercialization. In the last years it occurred a great increase of the free software development, therefore the recent and strong expansion of its use took to be competitive and until being dominant in some areas. Evaluating this process by the economic point of view, the individual behavior of the commercial programmers and effort of company to develop open source projects has been intensive. Why programmers and large companies would invest time and money in a project that could not give an immediate financial return and even not provide a register right of property? The objective of this work is the investigation and discussion of the reasons that lead companies and people to participate in the open source software communities.