Lerner, Josh and Jean Triole.  "Some Simple Economics of Open Source."  The Journal of Industrial Economics. Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 197-234.  Blackwell Publishing.

This article from The Journal of Industrial Economics surveys some of the basic economics of the open source software model.  The article begins by noting how open source practices have in fact existed in the realm of software development for several decades, but that the practice of open source software development has grown more concretized and widespread due to the rise of the Internet (to demonstrate this, the article provides a brief history of software development from the 70s to present day).  The article then goes on to examine several case studies involving specific products of open source software development, specifically Apache, Linux, Perl and Sendmail.

Perhaps one of the more unique aspects of the article is the close examination of the motivation for developers to work with open source rather than closed source software.  The authors identify several types of incentives that they hypothesize lure developers to the open source model.  Such incentives include career concern incentive and the ego gratification incentive.  Both of these incentives are categorized in economic terms as what's called a signalling incentive.  The authors list several conditions under which signalling incentives are strengthened, and all of these conditions appear to be present within the open source model.  For example, the ego gratification incentive is in part fulfilled by peer recognition.  The open source model strengthens this incentive because the development process is transparent, meaning all changes to source codes are tracked and tied to specific developers, thus allowing for a high level of peer recognition.

While this article may ultimately pose more questions than it answers, it marks a necessary step towards closer examination of the open source model.  By examining the model from an economic perspective, the article is helping to systematize and deconstruct the motivations and human behaviors that govern the ways in which open source development operates.

Roth, Daniel.  "Open Source Software Made Developers Cool.  Now It Can Make Them Rich." Wired. March 2008.  Conde Nast Publications.

This article from Wired highlights how open source software can be commercially viable, even though the development of it isn't based directly on monetary compensation.  As the article states, 30 open source sotware companies were bought for more than $1 billion in 2007, which is double the number of sales from 2005.  One reason for this commercial interest in open source software is that such software has proven particularly well-developed in the past.  Linux, for instance, is a more stable operating system than Windows, and Mozilla Firefox is a highly popular open source web browser.

The article also points out the main ways open source software manages to make money: "The money comes from selling add-ons, service contracts, and hardware to go with the software."  The examples presented in this article show how open source software can be a commercially viable business endeavor - a fact that goes against the original free software movement from which open source software is derived.  Such evidence supports Google's strategic interest in developing its own open source software for the mobile market with Android and also shows how open source software can prove successful in seemingly incompatible environments (for example, the article describes how open source software has recently been used to set up trading platforms for hedge funds, which are "notoriously insistent on proprietary systems).