The Economic Crisis and the Software Industry

In the recent years the Open Source Software (OSS henceforward) development movement gained a considerable attention from various academic research fields. Due to the nature of the OSS development process namely that it involves contributors from many different locations and that organizations sharing code to develop and reform programs, requires an interdisciplinary understanding.During fall 2008 the world economy experienced dramatic falls in the GDP leading to a deep recession. According to the FLOSSmole project - an internet based collaborative collection and analysis of the free/libre/open source project data - the number of registered projects to the OSS hosting sites started to decrease since late 2008.Through a review of the existing literature in this book an econometric model was developed in order to investigate different macroeconomic factors that might be influential on the behaviour of OSS activity. By analyzing the software industry as a whole the results were put into an exploratory framework which helps the understanding.The results should be useful especially for professionals in the Software Industry and academics from the Economics field.