Summary : Michael Feldstein's contribution to the OSS and OER in Education Series. In this post, he writes about how open source projects work from an economic perspective. Drawing on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase and Harvard economics professor Yochai Benkler, he will provide some perspective on how open source projects manage to defy conventional wisdom about economics and self-interested behavior, and gives some questions that universities can ask when considering whether a particular open source software project is likely to be successful.
Paul Krugman is a well-known, unabashedly liberal, nobel prize winning economist who blogs for the New York Times. His blogs are interesting, that is for sure.