University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 11-7-2016 Open Source, Modular Platforms, and the Challenge of Fragmentation Christopher S. Yoo University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Computer and Systems Architecture Commons, Computer Law Commons, Digital Communications and Networking Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, and the Science and Technology Policy Commons Repository Citation Yoo, Christopher S., "Open Source, Modular Platforms, and the Challenge of Fragmentation" (2016). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 1693. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1693 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Open Source, Modular Platforms, and the Challenge of Fragmentation Christopher S. Yoo* Abstract Open source and modular platforms represent two powerful conceptual paradigms that have fundamentally transformed the software industry. While generally regarded complementary, the freedom inherent in open source rests in uneasy tension with the strict structural requirements required by modularity theory. In particular, third party providers can produce noncompliant components, and excessive experimentation can fragment the platform in ways that reduce its economic benefits for end users and app providers and force app providers to spend resources customizing their code for each variant.