The Study on Innovation Mechanism of Open Source Software Community

This paper intends to analyze the innovation mechanism of open source community in view of system engineering, economics and ecology. Firstly, the concept of open source production is proposed and defined on the basis of system engineering, and then the economic characteristics of open source are put forward and summarized through the analysis of the difference of production structure between open source software and proprietary software. Subsequently, the "innovation entropy" is proposed to measure the efficacy of community innovation and the mechanism is further revealed according to dissipative structure and complex science theory.