The Metaibrary is the only on-line research resource focusing exclusively on standards and standard setting. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/ From the perspective of antitrust authorities, the multiplication of patents embodied in technology standards is a source of concerns. Certainly it is necessary and efficient that patents owners derive a revenue from the use of the standard. Yet by their function - ensuring compatibility between different products by promoting a common technology platform in a particular industry - standards generate potential for market power far beyond the legal protection conferred by patents. Patent holders may thus be tempted to leverage their position to make illegal profits. Such concerns arise in two different cases that have fueled antitrust debates and economic research during the last decade. On the one hand, patent owners may be tempted to collude by coordinating their licensing policies. The difficulty here is that some coordination between them within a patent pool may actually be pro-competitive. After a brief introduction, we explain in the first part why, and on what conditions, patent pools should be accepted by antitrust authorities. On the other hand, patent owners may be tempted to manipulate the standard setting process by waiting for the wide adoption of the standard before charging excessive royalties to its users. We present this hold-up problem in the second part, and show how appropriate rules for standard setting processes can help mitigate it. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/ Prompted by persistent complaints, particularly from the information and communication technology (ICT) industries, about the dangers allegedly posed by strong patents of poor quality, both the legislative and judicial branches have recently made attempts at patent reform. At least for the moment, legislative reform has been thwarted, largely by opposition from the biopharmaceutical industry. Judicial efforts at reform have been more successful. As with legislative efforts, however, the biopharmaceutical industry has been quite opposed to judicial reform. The apparently disparate needs of different industries have led some commentators to suggest that patent reform may need to be \"industry specific\" - perhaps treating the biopharmaceutical industry differently from other industries. This Essay argues that such suggestions are premature. Even when patent reform does not treat industries differently (as the recent Supreme Court cases do not), disparate impact on different types of innovation is likely to be the norm. More generally, patent reform that is industry-specific is undesirable for at least three reasons. First, the standards-based approach of traditional patent jurisprudence automatically takes into account the disparate technical challenges associated with information creation and development for different innovators. Second, to the extent that the outlier set of innovations appears to be end product therapeutics, such end product therapeutics are already embedded in a web of highly \"innovation specific\" regulatory and market structures that do much of the heavy lifting in terms of setting up barriers to entry and influencing price. Finally, in those situations where neither existing patent law standards nor existing regulation specific to end product therapeutics is sufficiently sensitive to relevant considerations of economic policy, additional facially neutral standards could be implemented. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/ Open Source Software (OSS) Development has come of age. Weak intellectual property protection has allowed for the development of high quality software. Herein I hope to explain this process through economic theory. I examine the current literature available on the topic, develop cases looking at the state of various OSS projects and firms in their reaction to Open Source as a model of software development, and examine historical instances of free knowledge trading. Through this examination I hope to answer the ultimate question of “How does Open Source Software Development work in the context of current economic theory?” http://www.consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/ Open source projects are characterized by their distributed developers, openness, and use of a community-based development process. Successful open source projects such as Apache, Linux, and PHP have a web-based Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) that provides source code repository access, knowledge management, discussion lists, bug tracking, and user support. Distributed software development is also increasingly common for commercial software projects, and benefits from using web-based CDEs. GForge, derived from the SourceForge package, is an open web-based CDE that is seeing widespread open source and commercial use. To support remote authoring of web pages and file contents, as well as remote source code access, GForge uses several network protocols, including SSH/SFTP, CVS pserver, and FTP. These protocols inevitably introduce security risks and add administrative work. We modified GForge to eliminate use of FTP, SSH/SFTP, and CVS protocols, using instead a WebDAV-based integration. The new CDE, called Davenport, uses only the HTTP/WebDAV protocol, and HTTP/WebDAV replaces the other protocols without sacrificing functionality. In this paper we describe the architecture and features of Davenport, and show how WebDAV replaces existing network protocols. We discuss the future development directions of CDEs including integration of client side IDEs and using a CDE as a software test bed. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/ The open source software (OSS) landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. While OSS and its Free Software antecedent were largely driven by ideology and individual commitment, the main driving force of OSS today is commercialization and opportunities for inter-organizational collaboration. OSS is no longer primarily about enthusiasts contributing to SourceForge projects but increasingly about commercial organizations developing software in “coopetitive ecosystems”, and many companies are now actively involved in Open Source. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/