The Success of Open Source

Weber is a political scientist at Berkeley, and his question is deliberately provocative: why does open source work when standard economic theory predicts it should not? Voluntary collaboration on public goods, without strong intellectual property incentives, producing software that competes with corporate products — none of this fits the models. Weber rejects both the altruism explanation and the signaling explanation as insufficient and instead analyzes open source as a distinct political economy with its own property regime, governance structures, and coordination mechanisms. The book is rigorous in its social science and refuses to romanticize the phenomenon it studies. Weber shows that the success of open source is not a refutation of institutional economics but an expansion of it — a case that reveals the limits of existing models rather than the irrelevance of institutions. For product leaders, this is the most intellectually serious attempt to explain why a mode of production that shouldn't work does, and what conditions make it fragile.