Student Projects:OpenSource Motivation

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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

These subpages will provide a place to discuss the four sub-topics of the paper and provide ideas, links to papers, etc. The main author of each sub-topic is listed beside the sub-topic name:

Draft of the One-Page Project Description

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


Team Members

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?

GailFrederick's draft topic statement

Volunteers for non-profit organizations are fascinating people. They provide expertise and labor for free, motivated by the vision and goals of the organization. Both groups benefit. The organization is propelled by the donations of its volunteers. The volunteer feels pride and perhaps also gains experience and reputation.

Volunteers about at every step in the cycle of open source software projects - in design, development, evangelization, (marketing?,) distribution and consumption. Major volunteer constituents in the open-source software movement include software developers, project incubators, private-sector consumers and public institutions.

Our policy brief investigates the motivations of these constituents to participate in an open-source project. We consider the benefits of association for each constitutent. We analyze whether the benefits of association with open-source software differ from association with closed-source, for-profit software systems.

Jeff West's draft topic statement

This paper will address the reasons that people choose open source as a policy for software projects. We will discuss rewards for organizations and individuals including economic impact, software philosophy, and personal satisfaction. We will first address the motivation of the private and public sectors to contribute resources into creating projects which seem to have little or no value at first glance. Later, we will discuss the reasons that individual developers might choose to work on open source projects (both for private and public sector investors and as individuals).

Richard Michaelson's draft topic statement
    Two extremes typically characterized Open Source (OS) discourse.  One extreme speaks of OS, like a religion, as a revolutionary production model [add more descriptors].  The other extreme is entirely pessimistic and posits OS as a passing fad since it is ultimately economically unsustainable.  To policymakers and other interested in OS issues, these opposing characterizations, at minimum, makes it confusing and difficult to construct meaningful OS policies.
    This brief/white paper is not an attempt to provide the final answer on which characterization of OS is most truthful.  Instead, we will provide policymakers with tools to better think through OS issues by discussing the role of motivation and rewards, a theme underlying most of OS discourse, to which each extreme characterization posits opposing views.
    Specifically, we explore the role of motivation from the supply and demand sides.  For example, what prompts developers to contribute to OS, given the assumption developers' contributions are on their own time and without compensation?  Is this assumption even true?  On the demand side, why do consumers want OS over closed source (CS) technology?  In addition, various world governments as well as state governments in the U.S. have increasingly turned to OS.  What are their incentives?  Furthermore, for-profits are employing OS both as a tool to help run their businesses and as a basis for their business models.  Why?  And what are the kinds of business models emerging in these nascent markets?
    This brief will explore these issues of motivation.  Chapter 1 will discuss A.  Chapter 2 will discuss B.  Chapter 3 will dicuss C.  Chapter 4 discusses D.  Regardless of the veracity of either extreme OS characterization, our discussion of motivation in relatoin to OS will provide policy makers with some tools to think through their decisions on both OS policy and OS use.

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 (Jeff West):

More interesting reading, on all subtopics:

General Sources of Computer Science Papers:


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 will focus on the subtopic of developer motivations and rewards.

Jeff West will focus on the reasons that consumers choose to adopt open source programs.

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

Richard Michaelson will focus on Incubator Motivations and Rewards. (according to what he said in email. Please correct, Richard, if this is out of date...)

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