Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Giovanni Camponovo
3.5 Motivations in open source software communities
Literature about motivation in open source software communities is also quite large. In the following
table we summarize the most relevant papers that study contributors’ motivations empirically. It is
worth noticing that there also are a number of papers describe motivations using a case-study
methodology or economic models (see Bitzer et al. (2007) for a concise review) which are not
reported in the following table as they do not offer an empirical justification.
In contrast with the other two types of communities examined in this paper, in this case it is often not
possible to make the distinction between member-generated and firm-supported communities since
most of the papers described below wither addressed their surveys to a mix of communities (thus
potentially comprising communities of both types) or did not specify to which type the community
belonged.
Table 5: Motivations in Open Source communities
Author
(Hars and Ou,
2001)
Interest
enjoyment
self-determination
(Lakhani and
Wolf, 2005) enjoyment
(David and
Shapiro, 2008)
(Oreg and
Nov, 2008)
(Baytiyeh and
Pfaffman,
2010 )
like the
challenge
flow
Psychological factors Social factors Utilitarian factors
competenc
e selfesteem
human
capital
improve
skills
learn &
get better
selfdevelopme
nt
learning &
creation
altruistic
values
altruism
ideological
motives
ideological
& altrusim
altruistic
altruism
social
relations
community
identificatio
n
like the
team
(low)
interact with
developers
social
influence reciprocity
peer
recognitio
n (low)
enhance
reputation
(low)
reputationbuilding
contribute
because
use
Utility
(pers.
need)
personal
needs
personal
needs
personal
needs
Utility
(rewards)
paid for
developmen
t
paid for
contribution
employer
pressure
(low)
Table 3 shows that the motivations that drive open source participants are variegate. The most
important motivations appear to be the need of feeling competent (which is also close to the feeling of
enjoyment of taking on a challenge) as well as altruism (which is coherent with the values of freedom
behind the open source movement). Another common motivation is linked to personal need: many
open source projects and contributions do indeed start with the idea of developing functionalities
needed by the developers themselves. The presence of rewards is also unsurprising, as enterprises
increasingly make use of the open source development model and developers are increasingly being
paid to work on it (Fitzgerald, 2006). On the other hand, it is surprising that reputation and social
relations are seldom found to be important motivations.
4. Discussion and conclusions
By performing a literature review of empirical studies in virtual communities, this paper shows that the
motivations that drive members to participate in such communities are rather diverse and variegate:
they comprise intrinsic psychological reasons (such as intrinsic enjoyment, need to feel worthy and
competent and good feeling of being altruistic), social reasons (such as the desire to entertain social
relations with interesting people, get social recognition or respect reciprocity exchanges in a
community) as well as economic reasons (such as the utility obtained by satisfying a personal need
as well as extrinsic benefits).
This paper also proposed a classification that distinguishes among various types of virtual
communities based on their orientation (social, professional and commercial) and their structure (pure
communities self-managed by members and hybrid communities supported by a firm or nonprofit
organization).
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