The Role of Open Source in New Business Formation: Innovations for Development

Abstract

Innovative uses of ICTs can bring about development. The open source software movement offers new opportunities for innovation. In particular, the use of such platforms can enable entrepreneurs in low resource environments to access and use needed software to support their new businesses. This paper investigates the role of open source software for development. This research shows that participation in open source communities is significantly correlated with new business formation. Through an analysis of datasets from the World Bank and GitHub, the largest open source platform, this paper finds a relationship between open source participation, new business formation and their effects on development, through unemployment rates. There is a strong, positive correlation between new business registrations and active GitHub users, which was statistically significant. The implications for development are in the effect of a positive relationship in job creation based on business formation and open source participation