Analysis Of Competition Between Open Source Software And Proprietary Software

The open source movement which is beginning in the 1990s has caused quite a stir in the software market.there is a big gap between china and developed country in software industry,to narrow the gap is very necessary for us,and the open source movement is a good chance to our software industry.we can acknowledge the influence on software industry of open source software by analyzing the competition between the open source software and the Proprietary Software,and then to decide whether we can use open source software to develop our software industry.In this paper we assume that Proprietary software is provided by profiting-maximizing firms while open source software(OSS) is freely available.However,OSS requires that users have the computer knowledge,and users with different levels of computer knowledge in OSS incur different costs deploying OSS.Based on the assumption of heterogeneous users,taking account in the network effect,the different relationship between the utility of open source software and the Proprietary software and different compatibility model,this paper analyzes the competition between OSS and PS and studies the market equilibrium.