Dual Licensing in Open Source Software Markets

In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commercial sustainability of a particular open source strategy known as dual licensing. We show that the decision to employ a dual licensing strategy occurs whenever the the strength and the relevance of the contribution of the OS community is sufficiently large. This result points to the crucial role of OS licensing schemes for firms embracing open source strategies, and can help explaining the observed proliferation of the open source licenses.