Carrots and Rainbows: Motivation and Social Practice in Open Source Software Development

Abstract

software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation-practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS.

Open government objectives and participation motivations

“…They were required to state to what extent they agree to statements that measure participants' attitudes toward ideology, fun, reputation, pro-social behavior, reciprocity, learning, own use, career and pastime for each type of open government initiative. Instead of Von Krogh et al's (2012) altruism and kinship we used pro-social behavior, because pro-social behavior is easier to measure and less error-prone (Eisenberg et al, 2007) and kinship is included in prosocial behavior. We used and adapted statements from Alexy and Leitner (2011) (Alexy & Leitner, 2011;Kaufmann et al, 2011;Leimeister et al, 2009) to increase the content validity.…”

“…• Pro-social behavior covers all kinds of behaviors which lead to a positive social outcome, regardless of the motivation of the actor (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2007). • Kinship describes the motivation of contributing to a community to which one belongs, in order to help this community without expecting economic rewards (Von Krogh et al, 2012). • Fun or enjoyment is one of the most influential factors when explaining the amount of time spent on FLOSS projects (Luthiger and Jungwirth (2007).…”

“…• Reputation that can be gained within the community and to externals is an important FLOSS motivator (Von Krogh et al, 2012). The first signals the potential of new employers to identify the skills of the programmer.…”

“…The first signals the potential of new employers to identify the skills of the programmer. Especially students hope to enhance their job prospects by contributing to FLOSS projects and therefore Von Krogh et al Von Krogh et al (2012) added an extra category "career" to the more general category of reputation. • Reciprocity describes the rationality of people to contribute to FLOSS, because they hope to gain something in return by contributing to the source code.…”

“…Von Krogh, Haefliger, Spaeth, and Wallin (2012) give ten reasons for participation in FLOSS projects: Ideology, pro-social behavior (altruism), kinship, fun, reputation, reciprocity, learning, own use, career and pay. These are described here and elaborated with some additional literature where relevant.…”