Pricing Open Source Software

In this paper, we examine the issue of pricing open source software. We compare three different pricing mechanisms: commercial software, open source software dual-licensing, and open source software support. We investigate whether the open source software pricing models are viable under monopoly and duopoly when an open source software vendor competes with a commercial software vendor. Our model considers the motivation for and the barrier to open source software adoption, which provides a better picture of the open source software market. We identify the factors that affect the optimal pricing strategy of the commercial and the open source software vendors. Our results can give pricing guidelines to the open source software vendors in the case of monopoly and duopoly, which is not clear in the current state.