Open source software: A community of altruists

Baytiyeh, Hoda; Pfaffman, Jay

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.04.008

Cited by 37 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…These considerations reflect a narrowly pragmatic reasoning that makes evident the self-interest and possibilities for individual gains that a creator can make by taking and using instrumentally these particular gifts. They are not significant for expressing altruism as commonly believed to be the case for practices of sharing software (Raymond, 2000;Baytiyeh and Pfaffman, 2010). Rather, gift exchanges of this kind represent a more humanistic way of pursuing self-interest than through market exchanges (Bollier, 2001).…”

Section: Software: a Useful Giftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open cultural production and the online gift economy: The case of Blender

Velkova¹

2016

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The economies of the Internet are largely driven by sharing. Much of it is often veiled in a celebratory discourse that emphasizes how sharing artifacts online through gift exchanges removes hierarchies and creates broader access to public knowledge, such as in projects of free culture and open source software development. The article critically interrogates these assumptions and the gift economy of open cultural production more generally. Using a practice called open source animation film making, developed by Blender, an organisation at the core of the largest open source 3D computer graphics community, this paper shows that the discourse surrounding free culture online has largely misunderstood the complexity and ambiguities of the economy below the cultural politics of openness. With the help of classical theories of gift and value I discuss issues of debt, obligation, status, discipline, and social hierarchies created by exchanging online a variety of digital artifacts of different value, such as software, culture, and labor. This article shows that the wealth of open cultural production relies on combining multiple dimensions of gifting with fiscal and hidden forms of capital, producing a culture of secrecy in parallel to that of openness.

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Section: Software: a Useful Giftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open cultural production and the online gift economy: The case of Blender

Velkova¹

2016

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“…There were several factors in the literature findings such as Motivation to learn and create Social motivators, Flow motivators and Altruism motivators, those motivators helped the global open source community developers to contribute to OSPs [9]. Other motivations such as Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Motivation also helped [4,6,13].…”

Section: B Why People Join Loscmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not everyone who is part of the open source community would write open source code, some do not have the skill for it, instead they contribute in other ways such as translating, documenting as well as support and training [1,9]. The ones who write the open source code are the ones who have the hobby of programing and they spend a lot of time on the computer [1].…”

Section: B Open Source Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Local Open Source Communities in the Development of Open Source Projects

Abdulwahhab

Alabady

Sattar

et al. 2016

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Abstract-in this paper we are going investigate the role of local open source communities (LOSCs) in the development of open source projects (OSPs). We are going to look into the importance of the LOSCs, the motivation to join them and their impacts on OSP. Our interest in this topic originated from the fact that there is a lack of studies regarding this topic. To have a clear understanding of the problem, we have decided to adopt the case study strategy as our research methodology. In the research we have conducted seven interviews with members within different LOSCs. The results we obtained have proven the importance of LOSCs and the role it plays in the development of OSP.

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“…How contributors may be attracted and retained has been examined in relation to open source communities [1,43,51,57]. Organizations collaborate through open source communities (even with their competitors) due to shared values that focus on the advancement of shared technologies and perceived benefits of these joint communal engagements [22].…”

Section: Attractionmentioning

confidence: 99%