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Following the Code: Spillovers and Knowledge Transfer

  • Neil Gandal EMAIL logo , Peter Naftaliev and Uriel Stettner
Published/Copyright: September 26, 2018

Abstract

Knowledge spillovers in Open Source Software (OSS) can occur via two channels: In the first channel, programmers take knowledge and experience gained from one OSS project they work on and employ it in another OSS project they work on. In the second channel, programmers reuse software code by taking code from an OSS project and employing it in another. We develop a methodology to measure software reuse in a large OSS network at the micro level and show that projects that reuse code from other projects have higher success. We also demonstrate knowledge spillovers from projects connected via common programmers.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Israel Science Foundation (grants #1287/12 and #1069/15). Any opinions expressed are those of the authors. We are grateful to Lukasz Ggrzybowski, the editor, and to an anonymous referee for comments and suggestions that significantly improved the paper. We also thank Andrea Pozzi and Sarit Weisburd, and seminar participants at EIEF, NYU, MIT, University of Warwick, and Tel Aviv University for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Supplementary Material:

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/rne-2017-0056).


Published Online: 2018-09-26
Published in Print: 2017-09-26

©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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