Research On Open Source Software's Diffusion Mechanism In China

Open Source Software (OSS), i.e. software distributed with the human-readable source code, has recently become one of the most important economic models of the software industry. OSS permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. The recent development and deployment of OSS in China have been outstanding, and we want to propose in this paper an economic analysis of this phenomenon.In the first chapter, we determine the causes of the emergence of open source software and their diffusion outside the "clubs" user-programmers. We show that the cooperative production of software is not something new, since the software were first developed in this way, long before the model of commercialization of software that we know today. The recent technological progress, especially the arrival of networks and the Internet, have increased the demand for compatible, perennial and personalized software. The open nature and modularity of OSS respond to market needs in a better manner, and make users choose these software. We finally show that OSS organization of production is more efficient because of a better management of incremental innovation, and that it is a sustainable and efficient economic organization, which can provide a viable platform for a local software industry and thus contribute to a China's economic development. In the second chapter, we focus on China's specific factors that may promote or oppose the spread of OSS. We follow an approach by increasing returns to analyze how businesses, industries and environment interact. We study three positive feedback systems to understand the effect of increasing returns on Chinese software industry: social, political and economic. We have show that there are more favorable conditions for the diffusion of OSS than for proprietary technologies in China. However, the diffusion of OSS has not yet reached a sufficient magnitude to be able to analyze data obtained from users, so we used a model to study the diffusion of OSS in China.We used a model of technology competition to study the diffusion of OSS according to the characteristics of Chinese software market. By comparing different user preference profiles and various initial scenarios of distributions of operating systems, we were able to identify the factors playing an important role in the diffusion. We show that when the redistribution of externalities reaches a sufficient level, the diffusion of OSS occurs rapidly. We finally highlighted the primordial role of niche adopters in the diffusion process, and drew conclusions on opportunity for China to take further advantage of this phenomenon and improve the diffusion of open-source software on its market.