The Knowledge Transfer Office of
University of Crete and the Master program
in Business Economics TIME- MBE, organize on Tuesday 25 October at 13:00 the 2^nd
Seminar for 2022-2023. 

Speaker is mr.Stefan Bechtold, from ETH Zurich.
The title of the presentation is “On
the Expressive Function of Open Source”.

To attend the seminar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/96479541729

Meeting ID: 964 7954 1729

Abstract: Open-source software poses a conundrum: Open-source software
licenses outline clear conditions under which licensed code can be reused.
However, these licenses are rarely litigated, many open-source developers do
not seem to care about the restrictions imposed by them, and developer
communities are often widespread global networks with limited social ties. As a
result, it is unclear what role open-source licenses play in governing and
guiding software code re-use and cumulative innovation. In particular, the
low-enforcement environment might suggest that compliance with software
licenses could be low. Our study investigates whether developers comply with
open-source software licenses. Analyzing a large network of code reuse hosted
on GitHub, we present evidence suggesting that license compliance matters for
cumulative innovation even in a low-enforcement environment. In particular,
software governed by copyleft licenses is re-used less often than software
governed by permissive licenses. We link our findings to the debate on the
expressive function of law and discuss the implications for open-source
software development and follow-on innovation.