2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
The Contribution of the Software Industry to Japanese Economic Growth
| Project/Area Number |
23530267
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Applied economics
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| Research Institution | University of Tsukuba |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2011 – 2013
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| Keywords | economic growth / open source software / development communities / industrial clusters / software assets / Japanese economy |
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| Research Abstract |
We examine the possible application of open source software licensing and development methods (OSS) to the Japanese software industry from several points of view. First, we show that if programmers engage in OSS "just for fun" (as the creator of the Linux kernel title his autobiography), there is lower bound to the output share produced by the OSS sector, despite the great advantage in financing for the proprietary sector. Second, we examine the contribution of software assets to Japanese economic growth, and show that it is disproportionately large. Third, we make an initial foray in researching the possibility that what OSS developers themselves call "the development community" may be treated as a "virtual industrial cluster" mediated by the Internet. That is, it can access the "economies of agglomeration" that are believed to drive the success of geographical clusters, such as America's famous "Silicon Valley".
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