Publications
Publications
- 2020
How Competition Affects Contributions to Open Source Platforms: Evidence from OpenStreetMap and Google Maps
By: Abhishek Nagaraj and Henning Piezunka
Abstract
Open source platforms often face competition from commercial alternatives and yet we lack an understanding of whether and how commercial competition affects contributions to open source platforms. We study how contributions to OpenStreetMap, a widely-used open source mapping platform, changed following the competitive entry of Google Maps. We exploit the phased entry of Google Maps in different countries over time to isolate the effect of competition. We find that the entry of Google Maps has a negative effect on contributions to OpenStreetMap, illustrating that commercial competition plays an important role in shaping open source contributions. We then examine if different contributors react differently to competitive entry, finding that new contributors (those who are contributing for the first time) decrease their contributions while pre-existing contributors (those who contributed before competitive entry) increase their contributions. We find that the reduction in new contributors seems to be driven by a reduction in consumption of the open source platform. The increase in contributions by pre-existing contributors seems to be associated with their attachment to the platform, which is anchored in their ideological inclination towards open source and to a lesser extent, the social interaction it offers with their fellow contributors.
Keywords
Citation
Nagaraj, Abhishek, and Henning Piezunka. "How Competition Affects Contributions to Open Source Platforms: Evidence from OpenStreetMap and Google Maps." Working Paper, February 2020.