Research On The Open Source Knowledge Production

Open Source Knowledge Production (OSKP), which makes knowledge created by volunteers collaborating via internet and opened to the public, is very different from traditional understanding of knowledge production and intelligence property. In this dessertation, the study of OSKP covers property rights choice, resource and profit distribution, and innovation and cooperation mechanism, on the view of transaction cost and property rights economics.OSKP is conducted by open source license. The license defines the production's common property rights without abandoning its copyright, which allows the public to use, modify and distribute the product. With the knowledge production model developed in this dissertation, property structure and production decision behaviours of OSKP are analyzed and compared with that of private production. Analyses illustrates that, for OSKP where all producers give up their exclusive rights and share the products freely, the transaction cost of knowledge production and distribution decreases significantly, which benefits the producers as well as the collective cooperation and knowledge reproduction. This actually accords with the nature of public goods. It is concluded that OSKP provides a new model of private provision of public goods.Copyleft plays an important role in open source license. It demands the derived work of knowledge production only to be distributed under the same license as original work. This infection mechanism secures the permanence of OSKP. The production and decision behaviours of two engineers are analyzed under a two players game model developed. We found that the 'infection' nature of copyleft transfers the game from one stage to infinitely repeated stages, which thus breaks the prisoners' dilemma, provides multiple equilibrium and makes the cooperation become the only Nash equilibrium of the game. Copyleft successfully solves the free riding problem and stipulates the producers to take cooperation strategy.In real world, the Copyleft and Non-Copyleft licenses coexist. To interpret this phenomenon, a hypothesis of two types of OSKP is proposed in this dissertation, where the capability, motivation, and inspiration of for two types of producers are quite different. With the empirical data collected from Sourceforge.net and an econometric model we have developed, two types of OSKP are clearly demonstrated. Copyleft and Non-Copyleft have separated equilibrium. They provide two types of production contracts, and separate producers into the high capability group and the low capability group. High capability producers prefer to Non-Copyleft licenses in order to make better commerical profit by controling or privating the derivative works, while low capability producers prefer to Copyleft in order to keep the production open permanently and make profit only by using it.In addition, the features of OSKP are summarized by comparing with other cooperative R&D modes. It is concluded that profit distribution model of sharing the production in OSKP is an effective contract arrangement under transaction cost constraint, which maximizes the player's benefit from cooperation overflow.In summary, OSKP illustrates institutional change of knowledge production and property, induced by the information technology development. Open source license, protects knowledge common property rights and breaks the confinement of intellectual property which only protects private production, is transcendence and complementary of the conventional copyright system. Copyleft solves the dilemma of collective action, brings about private provision of public goods and enrichs public goods supply theory.