Author ORCID Identifier

Georg Link

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-3-2019

Publication Title

Journal of Cybersecurity

Volume

5

Issue

1

Abstract

The security of software is becoming increasingly important. Open source software forms much of our digital infrastructure. It, however, contains vulnerabilities which have been exploited, attracted public attention, and caused large financial damages. This article proposes a solution to shortcomings in the current economic situation of open source software development. The main idea is to introduce price signals into the peer production of software. This is achieved through a trading market for futures contracts on the status of software issues. Users, who value secure software, gain the possibility to predict outcomes and incentivize work, strengthening collaboration and information sharing in open source software development. The design of such a trading market is discussed and a prototype introduced. The feasibility of the trading market design is corroborated in a proof-of-concept implementation and simulation. Preliminary results show that the implementation works and can be used for future experiments. Several directions for future research result from this article, which contributes to peer production, software development practices, and incentives design.

Comments

© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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Funded by the University of Nebraska at Omaha Open Access Fund