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
• Richard Michaelson

Topic

Motivation and Rewards of Open Source

Why do developers, testers, documenters volunteer for open source projects? Why do people and organizations decide to adopt, install, upgrade and evangelize 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

Papers relevant to developer motivation and rewards (All papers in the possession of GailFrederick):

• A Quantitative Profile of a Community of Open Source Linux Developers - Dempsey et al, 1999
• Who is an Open Source Software Developer? - Dempsey et al, 2002. (evolution of above article)
• Altrustic individuals, selfish firms? The structure of motivation in Open Source software - Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004 (from http://www.firstmonday.org)
• Open Source Software: Intellectual Challenges for the Status Quo - Miller and Gotterbarn, PPT slides.
• The Ethics of Free Software - John Goerzen, 1998.
• Toward an Understanding of the Motivation of Open Source Software Developers - Ye and Kishida, 2003.
• There's no such thing as free (lunch) software - Michaelson, 2004.
• Transcript of ACM Interview with Chris DiBona, 2003.
• Is Open Source right for you? - Ascher, 2004.
• A Sociopolitical look at Open Source - Glass, 2003.
• The Age of Corporate Open Source Enlightenment - Ferris, 2003.
• Lessons from Open-Source Software Development - O'Reilly, 1999.

Team Organization

GailFrederick and Jeff West will focus on the subtopic of developer motivations and rewards.

Ian King will focus on the subtopic of governmental motivation for promotion of open source development.