Economics and Open source

Well here we are a couple or three weeks into the Fall semester, and I've been mulling over ideas for a research paper in my law and economics class, I've had a couple of ideas such as how the revocation of the DC and Chicago Handgun laws have might effect property laws, (which i think could be a good choice), but a discussion in my Saturday class (yes I said Saturday) about Joint Stock companies and Indentured Servitude got me to thinking. Having property rights is big driver of incentive for innovation. If the property is held in common this limits or eliminates innovation and and leads to freeloading.

Thinking about this, being a computer geek, my mind wondered to open source software, such as PHP, MySQL, and the magic that is Drupal. I have to say I'm pretty much a free loader on these technologies, but that is not the point. What keeps open source going, and is it sustainable. So it's time to take my freeloading butt over to Google and see what I find.