Student Projects:OpenSource Motivation

Motivation and Rewards of Open Source Development

How Project Team Members Communicate

Project Team Members communicate via this Wiki, starting on this page and with linked sub-pages linked from here.

There is also an email list, [1], that reaches all project members. GailFrederick manages the mailing list, please contact her for additions/removals.

Links to Project Sub-Pages

(no links yet)

Draft of the One-Page Project Description

(Project description is due Monday, November 8, 2004)

Team Members

• Gail Frederick
• Jeff West
• Ian King
• Kevin Watt

Topic

Motivation and Rewards of Open Source

Why do developers, testers, documenters volunteer for open source projects? Why do people and organizations decide to install open-source software? What motivates them, and what benefits do they eventually obtain?

Sub-Topics

* Developer Motivations and Rewards (i.e. Why do programmers contribute to open-source projects?)
* Consumer Motivations and Rewards (i.e. Why do consumers adopt / purchase open-source products?)
* Incubator Motivations and Rewards (i.e. Why do for-profit entitites incubate and otherwise support open-source products?
* Public Sector Motivations and Rewards (i.e. Why do governments and governmental agencies support open-source products through legislation, regulation and economic incentives?

Sources

Interesting reads which will be considered, not necessarily all used in the project:

• http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
• http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/04/19/2128256.shtml
• http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php (check out the Advocacy Index)

General Sources of Computer Science Papers:

• ACM Digital Library: http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm
• ACM Guide to Computing Literature: http://portal.acm.org/guide.cfm

Team Organization

GailFrederick will focus on the subtopic of developer motivations and rewards. (One other team member is invited to collaborate!)