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Understanding free software developers: Findings from the FLOSS study
Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of findings from the Survey of Developers from the FLOSS project, involving over 2700 respondents among free/open source software developers worldwide. The survey studied several factors influencing developers' participation within the free/open source community, including their perceptions of differences within the community and with the commercial software world, personal, ethical, political and economic motives for participation, and their degree of interaction within and contribution to the free/open source software community. These results are linked to preliminary findings from a study of developer contribution to the Linux kernel based on an analysis of the source code.
... Several researchers built upon SDT to explain the heterogeneous nature of individual's motivation in a broad range of domains [18,15], including OSS developers' motivation to contribute voluntarily to OSS projects. For example, several empirical studies found intrinsic motivation factors that played a significant role in motivating OSS developers, such as: ideology [5,22] altruism [22,23,24]; kinship amidity [5,25]; and enjoyment and fun [26,5] Several internalized extrinsic motivation factors were found to be important, such as reputation [22,27,28]; reciprocity [5,28]; learning [22,27,29]; and own use value [5,22,30]. We highlight that the most commonly cited extrinsic motivation factors are career building [4,30] and stipends [5,30,31]. ...
... Several researchers built upon SDT to explain the heterogeneous nature of individual's motivation in a broad range of domains [18,15], including OSS developers' motivation to contribute voluntarily to OSS projects. For example, several empirical studies found intrinsic motivation factors that played a significant role in motivating OSS developers, such as: ideology [5,22] altruism [22,23,24]; kinship amidity [5,25]; and enjoyment and fun [26,5] Several internalized extrinsic motivation factors were found to be important, such as reputation [22,27,28]; reciprocity [5,28]; learning [22,27,29]; and own use value [5,22,30]. We highlight that the most commonly cited extrinsic motivation factors are career building [4,30] and stipends [5,30,31]. ...
... Several researchers built upon SDT to explain the heterogeneous nature of individual's motivation in a broad range of domains [18,15], including OSS developers' motivation to contribute voluntarily to OSS projects. For example, several empirical studies found intrinsic motivation factors that played a significant role in motivating OSS developers, such as: ideology [5,22] altruism [22,23,24]; kinship amidity [5,25]; and enjoyment and fun [26,5] Several internalized extrinsic motivation factors were found to be important, such as reputation [22,27,28]; reciprocity [5,28]; learning [22,27,29]; and own use value [5,22,30]. We highlight that the most commonly cited extrinsic motivation factors are career building [4,30] and stipends [5,30,31]. ...
Several open source software (OSS) projects expect to foster newcomers' onboarding and to receive contributions by participating in engagement programs, like Summers of Code. However, there is little empirical evidence showing why students join such programs. In this paper, we study the well-established Google Summer of Code (GSoC), which is a 3-month OSS engagement program that offers stipends and mentors to students willing to contribute to OSS projects. We combined a survey (students and mentors) and interviews (students) to understand what motivates students to enter GSoC. Our results show that students enter GSoC for an enriching experience, not necessarily to become frequent contributors. Our data suggest that, while the stipends are an important motivator, the students participate for work experience and the ability to attach the name of the supporting organization to their resum\'es. We also discuss practical implications for students, mentors, OSS projects, and Summer of Code programs.
... Driven by its success, the OSS has attracted intense research interest, examining the motivation of participants in the context of the OSS (Hertel et al., 2003;Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003;Ghosh, 2005;Lakhani and Wolf, 2005;Lattemann and Stieglitz, 2005;Roberts et al., 2006;Osterloh and Rota, 2007;von Krogh et al., 2012). OSH has existed so far only in the shadow of OSS. ...
... Hence, one could easily conclude that the own-use value of the final product potentially is a pervasive motivation to participate in the development. Several studies of the OSS communities report that own-use value can be a motivation to contribute (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003;Ghosh, 2005;Lakhani and Wolf, 2005). ...
... Another example of an extrinsic motivation that individuals can self-regulate and thus internalize is the desire and expectation to learn and acquire new skills through contributing to OS projects. Learning 6 R&D Management 2018 can be an important driver of contribution to open source projects (Lerner and Tirole, 2002), as has been found for OSS development (Ghosh, 2005). Previous research found learning as the primary reason to contribute to open source communities (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003;Lakhani and Wolf, 2005). ...
Open source software (OSS) and hardware (OSH) are two expressions of one broader concept and its related movement. One of the most fundamental questions relating to these phenomena is why developers contribute their private resources to these public goods. While this question has been discussed, theorized, and empirically investigated in the context of OSS, there has been no research so far in the context of OSH. Can we really assume the motivations behind the development of the OSH to be the same as those behind OSS? Based on the self-determination theory (SDT), we provide original insights into the motivations behind contributions to OSH development. We collected data from the most common and active 3D printing communities, which are the main loci of OSH development. We thus have a unique cross-sectional data set with participants from over 30 different countries using all kinds of different OSH platforms. Our analysis reveals several important findings: firstly, the motivations are in some aspects very similar to those in open source software notwithstanding different possibilities, hurdles, and incentives regarding the OSS and OSH. Above all, enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation is a major factor affecting contribution levels. Secondly, among internalized extrinsic motivations, expected private benefits through improving own skills stands out. Thirdly, different factors of internalized extrinsic motivations can have different moderating effects on the effect of enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation. Given the imminent changes in business models throughout manufacturing industries in order to adapt to the challenge that OSH will increasingly pose, our findings have important implications not only for OSH communities and 3D development platforms, but also for businesses that want and probably soon have to engage in open innovation.
... As a second group of motivations, intrinsic aspects generally include enjoyment-related, community-related, or obligation-based motivations (Lakhani and Wolf 2005). Among these, intellectual stimulation, learning and developing new skills, fun and enjoyment experienced, but also political motivations and gain of reputation are most often listed (Franke and Shah 2003;Ghosh 2005;Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann 2003;von Hippel and von Krogh 2003;von Krogh et al. 2012). This was also based on the realization that users regularly freely reveal their innovations to manufacturers or other users, making the information about the development a public good and giving up all (potential) intellectual property rights (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003), sometimes even expending resources for marketing in the process (Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel 2000;von Hippel 2005). ...
... Intrinsic motivations reported include the intellectual stimulation derived from the project, and aim of improving programming skills. In a similar study (Ghosh 2005), about a third of the respondents were motivated by monetary or career concerns (mostly for signaling competence), with the most important single factor being learning and developing new skills, or social motivations in general. Software-related or political motivations were much less important. ...
... Part four of the questionnaire was composed of questions about the motivations of the participants to develop mobile applications. The items were derived from previous studies about the motivational factors for third-party innovators and open source software developers, especially the lists of items from Lakhani and Wolf (2005), Ghosh (2005) and Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann (2003). A complete list of items from these studies was compiled, and duplicates were removed through consensus of the researchers. ...
This study provides insights into the success of smartphone applications (apps) based on the chosen business model and version release strategy, and relates these variables to the motivations of their third-party innovators in the smartphone OS market. The analysis is based on a questionnaire focusing on motivational factors and demographics of developers, coupled with secondary data on the apps themselves and their success. We find that apps developed due to the personal needs of the developer for new functionalities result in higher success in terms of number of downloads, whereas many of the intrinsic motivations outlined in user innovation theory do not have a significant impact on app success. Our findings imply that, while some insights from user innovation theory are applicable to understanding factors that contribute to the potential success of apps, the smartphone application software ecosystem has its own dynamics, including the absence of learning effects over several apps that require further focus and more in-depth research.
... Thirdly, the universe of ongoing open source communities is vast, and the projects differ broadly with respect to their sizes, success stages, aims, etc. (Krishnamurthy, 2002;Ghosh, 2002;Ghosh et al., 2002). FREENET is a mid-sized project that is large enough to uncover patterns of behavior in the community. ...
... Thirdly, the universe of ongoing open source communities is vast, and the projects differ broadly with respect to their sizes, success stages, aims, etc. (Krishnamurthy, 2002;Ghosh, 2002;Ghosh et al., 2002). FREENET is a mid-sized project that is large enough to uncover patterns of behavior in the community. ...
Traditional organization theory stresses formal organizational structures and an explicit hierarchy as coordination instruments in organizations on the market-firm continuum. Newer forms of organizing move away from this model, such as in the case of open source software development communities. This paper employs inductive, exploratory case study research to investigate a hierarchy in an open source community. It aims at answering the following research questions: Firstly, is the hierarchical principle prevailing in (seemingly democratic) open source communities? Secondly, in what is a hierarchy in open source projects grounded, and what influences the hierarchical positions of individuals in this setting?
My findings suggest that although open source software development communities appear to be entirely democratic at first sight, they are only limitedly so. In the communities studied, a hierarchy prevails different from those we know from bureaucratic organizations. In open source communities, the prevailing hierarchy is entirely informal, emergent and it is grounded in the contributors’ project-specific knowledge. I will refer to this type of hierarchy as a ‘knowledge hierarchy’. My research reveals that an individual’s position in the knowledge hierarchy is determined by a variety of factors; in general, the earlier an individual enters a community, the more project-specific knowledge he or she is able to absorb, the higher this person’s position in the knowledge hierarchy. Knowledge was found to create mobility, entry and exit barriers for the contributors to a certain project. I do summarize my findings in a number of propositions and in a model of a knowledge hierarchy in open source communities.
... OSS contributors, however, are a heterogeneous group, with differing talents, skills, career goals, and motivations [7,8,9,10]. Some perform a variety of non-code related activities (e.g., advocacy, technical writing, translation, project management) [1,11] and follow a different pathway than the acclaimed "onion model" [12,13,1]. ...
... Definitions of success can affect educational choices, decisions about where to work, project involvement, career attainment, life satisfaction, and so on [14]. Thus far, the OSS literature has largely investigated the immediate motivation to join and continue in OSS [7,8,9,10], overlooking contributors' perceptions of success. Perceptions of success represent long-term goals and an imagined career future [15,16], which influences commitment [17] and human behavior [15,16]. ...
Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping exacerbate the current diversity & inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because ones perspective of success can affect ones personal, professional, and life choices, to support a diverse class of individuals we must first understand how OSS contributors understand success. Thus far, research has used a uni-dimensional, code-centric lens to define success. In this paper, we challenge this status quo to reveal OSS contributors multifaceted definitions of success. We do so through interviews with 27 OSS contributors whose communities recognize them as successful, and a follow-up open survey with 193 OSS contributors. Our study provides nuanced definitions of success perceptions inOSS, which might help devise strategies to attract and retain a diverse set of contributors, helping them attain their unique pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
... To characterize the users of the FLOSScoach portal, we searched in the literature who are the potential contributors. These potential contributors are students or programmers, male, between 20-40 years old that among other things, want to be recognized as a good professional by contributing to OSS projects [2,3,10,12]. Game elements can be applied to activities which were grouped in three different contexts: profile registration, forum, and tasks. ...
... We created one persona based on the literature of OSS projects [2,3,10,12] to represent the potential FLOSScoach users. The persona is shown in Figure 2. The name of persona is Augusto Camargo, he is 25 years old and is a web developer. ...
Several Open Source Software projects depend on volunteers' contributions and need a continuous influx of newcomers for their sustainability. However, newcomers face many barriers when making their first contribution. In a previous work, a web-based portal called FLOSScoach was proposed to support the first contribution of newcomers to Open Source Software Projects. The preliminary evaluation indicated that FLOSScoach has played an important role in guiding newcomers and in lowering barriers related to the orientation and the contribution process. Gamification has been widely used to engage and motivate people to accomplish tasks and improve their performance. Therefore, the goal of this study is to present the FLOSScoach gamification proposal, which is illustrated in the form of the high-fidelity prototypes as a step to support on the decision of the game elements. We also report on insights gathered in an evaluation of the proposed prototype.
... Existing OSS research on developers' participation behaviors mainly focused on the motivations of developers' initial participations (i.e., initial reasons for joining the projects) (Ghosh 2005;Hann et al. 2004;Hertel et al. 2003;Lakhani and Wolf 2005;Subramanyam and Xia 2008). Comparing with initial participations, there are very few studies that just have begun to explore what mechanisms may sustain long-term voluntary developers' project participations (Fang and Neufeld 2009). ...
... Existing OSS research on developers' participation behaviors mainly focused on the motivations of developers' initial participations (i.e., initial reasons for joining the projects) (Ghosh 2005;Hann et al. 2004;Hertel et al. 2003 (Fang and Neufeld 2009). Among these studies, Shah (2006) found that longterm participants enjoyed programming and interacting with other developers. ...
... In light of how women are treated on the internet, this fear does not seem unreasonable" Beneschott (2014). The lack of diversity among FOSS communities has been subjected to several prior studies (Ghosh 2005;Krieger et al. 2006;David and Shapiro 2008;Bosu and Sultana 2019). To increase diversity through recruitment of the underrepresented groups, FOSS communities such as Mozilla (Beard 2018), Debian (Ciceri 2021), and Fedora (Team 2019), as well as commercial software development organizations such as Google 1 and Deloitte (Bourke 2017), have adopted several initiatives. ...
Context
Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity, and the ratios of women in Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint at the existence of biases against women, it is unclear to what extent such biases influence the outcomes of various software development tasks.
Objective
This study conceptually replicates two recent studies by Terrell et al. and Bosu and Sultana that investigated gender biases in FOSS communities. We aim to identify whether the outcomes of or participation in code reviews (or pull requests) are influenced by the gender of a developer. In particular, we focus on two outcome aspects (i.e., code acceptance, and review interval) and one participation aspect (i.e., code review participation) of code review processes.
Method
With this goal, this study includes a total of 1010 FOSS projects. Ten out of those projects use Gerrit-based code reviews. The remaining 1000 are randomly selected from the GHTorrent dataset based on a stratified sampling of projects fitting certain criteria. We divided GitHub projects into four groups based on the number of distinct contributors. We developed six regression models for each of the 14 datasets (i.e., 10 Gerrit based and 4 GitHub-based) to identify if code acceptance, review intervals, and code review participation differ based on the gender and gender-neutral profile of a developer.
Results
Our results find significant gender biases during code acceptance among 13 out of the 14 datasets, with seven favoring men and the remaining six favoring women. We found significant differences between men and women in terms of code review intervals, with women encountering longer delays than men in three cases and the opposite in seven. Our results indicate reviewer selection as one of the most gender-biased aspects, with 12 out of 14 datasets exhibiting bias. A total of 11 out of the 14 cases show women having significantly lower code review participation than their men colleagues. Since most of the review assignments are based on invitations, this result suggests possible affinity biases among the developers. We also noticed a significantly higher likelihood of women using gender-neutral profiles. Supporting Terrell et al.’s claim, women with gender-neutral profiles had higher odds of code acceptance than men among three Gerrit-based projects. However, contradicting their results, we found significantly lower odds of code acceptance for women with gender-neutral profiles across all four GitHub project groups.
Conclusions
Though gender bias exists among many projects, the direction and amplitude of that bias vary based on project size, community, and culture. Similar bias mitigation strategies may not work across all communities, as the characteristics of biases and their underlying causes differ. As women are less likely to be invited for reviews, FOSS projects should take initiatives to ensure the equitable selection of women as reviewers.
... Extensively, the discussion spaces for the improvement and implementation of new code have a central hub of interaction with key members while peripherical participation enhances projects' transparency (Barcellini, Détienne & Burkhardt, 2014;Lin, 2004). Surveys conducted by Ghosh et al. (2002Ghosh et al. ( , 2005 indicate that most free software developers are involved in only one or two projects, interact with a few other participants, and hardly belong to the leading group of a specific initiative. ...
Optimistic visions of its liberating potential have accompanied the Internet since its inception. However, technopolitical communities have defended free knowledge, but they risk adopting liberal notions when there is a group hierarchy depending on technological skills or the time people invest in the project (Coleman & Golub, 2008; Crabu et al., 2016). Using a combined methodology, we aim to understand the decision-making and training processes of technopolitical communities in Spain. Results show that these projects are collective, and their communities are aligned with the availability of public materials on the Internet for individual learning and mutual support values. However, they must consider developing better-established training and decision-making strategies to attract more people and more diverse profiles. Otherwise, there is a risk of generating an elite of experts who may enjoy free knowledge but cannot effectively collectivize it and disrupt the context of informational capitalism.
... Geographic diversity in FOSS has received relatively little attention in scholarly works. In particular, while seminal survey-based and point-in-time medium-scale studies of the geographic origins of FOSS contributors exist [2,6,7,25,29,32], large-scale longitudinal studies of the geographic origin of FOSS contributors are still lacking. Such a quantitative characterization would be useful to inform decisions related to global development teams [8] and hiring strategies in the information technology (IT) market, as well as contribute factual information to the debates on the economic impact and sociology of FOSS around the world. ...
We conduct an exploratory, large-scale, longitudinal study of 50 years of commits to publicly available version control system repositories, in order to characterize the geographic diversity of contributors to public code and its evolution over time. We analyze in total 2.2 billion commits collected by Software Heritage from 160 million projects and authored by 43 million authors during the 1971-2021 time period. We geolocate developers to 12 world regions derived from the United Nation geoscheme, using as signals email top-level domains, author names compared with names distributions around the world, and UTC offsets mined from commit metadata.We find evidence of the early dominance of North America in open source software, later joined by Europe. After that period, the geographic diversity in public code has been constantly increasing. We also identify relevant historical shifts related to the UNIX wars, the increase of coding literacy in Central and South Asia, and broader phenomena like colonialism and people movement across countries (immigration/emigration).
... Personal enjoyment and learning opportunities are repeatedly cited as motivational drivers [18]. Learning new skills and self-improvement is particularly important, with surveys consistently placing such intrinsic motivation as a key reason for contributing to open source [19,20]. ...
We propose the use of the psychological contract asan alternative theoretical lens to study sustainedparticipation and engagement in open source, which isoften used as an example of new forms of digitizedindependent work. Psychological contracts are the set ofbeliefs held by individuals of their personal exchangewith an organization and other actors with which theywork. While previous literature has tended to studyinducements (e.g., intrinsic or extrinsic motivation) onits own, the psychological contract studies the relationbetween an individual’s expected inducements andcontributions. If these expectations are unmet, a breachcan take place that will affect contributor engagement.We suggest the usefulness of this theory inunderstanding why and how open source participantsdecide to stop or reduce their involvement. Participantshold multiple psychological contracts with the project,fellow developers, and users. The findings show thatbreach can be experienced with all of them either due tounmet contributions or inducements. We suggest further research into such breaches is required to understand their consequences on the sustainability of open source projects
... Many studies have focused on analyzing individuals' motivations and the incentives for participating in OSS projects [14,20,33,42,59,72]. Von Krogh et al. [68] classified contributors' motivations into three categories, namely, intrinsic motivation (e.g., ideology and fun), internalized extrinsic motivation (e.g., reputation and own use), and extrinsic motivation (e.g., career and pay). ...
While many forms of financial support are currently available, there are still many complaints about inadequate financing from software maintainers. In May 2019, GitHub, the world's most active social coding platform, launched the Sponsor mechanism as a step toward more deeply integrating open source development and financial support. This paper collects data on 8,028 maintainers, 13,555 sponsors, and 22,515 sponsorships and conducts a comprehensive analysis. We explore the relationship between the Sponsor mechanism and developers along four dimensions using a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, examining why developers participate, how the mechanism affects developer activity, who obtains more sponsorships, and what mechanism flaws developers have encountered in the process of using it. We find a long-tail effect in the act of sponsorship, with most maintainers' expectations remaining unmet, and sponsorship has only a short-term, slightly positive impact on development activity but is not sustainable. While sponsors participate in this mechanism mainly as a means of thanking the developers of OSS that they use, in practice, the social status of developers is the primary influence on the number of sponsorships. We find that both the Sponsor mechanism and open source donations have certain shortcomings and need further improvements to attract more participants.
... Wir brauchen demnach eine politische Bewegung für unsere Emanzipation in Sachen Zeitnutzung, eine Zeit-Emanzipation. 2 Selbst wenn also, global gesehen, Zeit im Überfluss zur Verfügung steht, kann die Zeit für bestimmte Tätigkeiten knapp sein. Die hauptsächlich von Rishab Ghosh (Ghosh 2005) ...
... OSS contributors, however, comprise an heterogeneous group, with differing talents, skills, career goals, and motivations [8,9,10,11]. Some perform a variety of non-code related activities (e.g., advocacy, technical writing, translation, project management) [1,12] and follow a much different pathway than the celebrated "onion model" [1,13,14]. ...
Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping create the current diversity \& inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because people's perspectives of success affect their personal, professional, and life choices, to be able to support a diverse class of individuals, we must first understand what OSS contributors consider successful. Thus far, research has used a uni-dimensional, code-centric lens to define success. In this paper, we challenge this status-quo and reveal the multi-faceted definition of success among OSS contributors. We do so through interviews with 27 OSS contributors who are recognized as successful in their communities, and a follow-up open survey with 193 OSS contributors. Our study provides nuanced definitions of success perceptions in OSS, which might help devise strategies to attract and retain a diverse set of contributors, helping them attain their "pots of gold at the end of the rainbow".
... Affirming this, the majority (144 out of 165) of men who answered our survey were coders. OSS contributors, however, comprise a heterogeneous group, with diverse talents, skills, career goals, and motivations [37,38,28,39]. Also from the first study, we found that some contributors perform a variety of non-code related activities (e.g., advocacy, technical writing, translation, project management) [30] and follow different pathways than the celebrated "onion model" [11,40,30]. ...
Women represent less than 24% of employees in the software development industry and experience various types of prejudice and bias. Despite various efforts to increase diversity and multi-gendered participation, women are even more underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. In my PhD, I investigate the following question: How can OSS communities increase women's participation in their projects? I will identify different OSS career pathways and develop a holistic view of women's motivations to join or leave OSS, as well as their definitions of success. Based on this empirical investigation, I will work together with the Linux Foundation to design attraction and retention strategies focused on women. Before and after implementing the strategies, I will conduct empirical studies to evaluate the state of the practice and understand the implications of the strategies.
... Their frameworks do not draw directly from economics, rather they are based on a psychological theory that roughly correspond to their understanding of human behaviour. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motives (Ryan & Deci, 2000; fi rst introduced by White, 1959) has been used as the basis of most survey studies conducted by economists (Luthiger, 2005;Lakhani & Wolf, 2005;Ghosh, 2005;Bonaccorsi & Rossi, 2006;Hars & Ou, 2001;Bitzer, Schrettl & Schröder, 2004). For example, Lakhani & Wolf (2005) found that FLOSS developers contribute out of a combination of intrinsic enjoyment-related and extrinsic income-related and obligation-driven motivations. ...
Volunteer motivation has been a central theme in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) literature. This research has been largely dominated by economists who rely in their surveys on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and the ‘hacker ethic’ – for profi t juxtaposition. The paper argues that survey-based analytical frameworks and research designs have led to a focus on some motivational attributions at the expense of others. It then presents a case study that explores dynamic, non-individualistic and content-sensitive aspects of motivations. The approach is based on socio-cultural psychology and the author’s observations of a hybrid fi rm-community FLOSS project, OpenOffi ce.org. Instead of separating intrinsic motivations from extrinsic ones, it is argued that complex and changing patterns of motivations are tied to changing objects and personal histories prior to and during participation. The boundary between work and hobby in an individual’s participation path is blurred and shifting.
... They point out that free software is an essential topic for the younger generations, while putting this tendency down to aspects such as technological breakthroughs and the market development of software products. Since the 1990s, access to computers and other devices from an early age has encouraged people to inquire into programming and to socialise in virtual communities (Ghosh, 2005;Margolis et al., 1999). ...
Free culture communities support self-learning, peer production, and the distribution of knowledge generated without any restrictions. However, free culture communities are not isolated from the social inequalities of the outside world. Understanding (in)visibility as the (in)ability to address internal under-representation within these communities, this research aims to analyse their member profiles and their perception of this issue. To this end, an online questionnaire was administered to 290 communities and interviews were conducted with members of 37 of these previously surveyed communities. The respondents and interviewees acknowledged that technopolitics requires a broad knowledge of the technical implications of their values, which makes access to and participation in a community more difficult. They also criticised the gender bias of their communities and, last but not least, pointed to other inequalities relating to the sexual orientation, socioeconomic level, or ethnic origin of the members of their communities.
... Wir brauchen demnach eine politische Bewegung für unsere Emanzipation in Sachen Zeitnutzung, eine Zeit-Emanzipation. 2 Selbst wenn also, global gesehen, Zeit im Überfluss zur Verfügung steht, kann die Zeit für bestimmte Tätigkeiten knapp sein. Die hauptsächlich von Rishab Ghosh (Ghosh 2005) ...
... Our approach could be used to support open source projects. Studies have identified several motives for developers to join open-source projects, including a desire to learn and develop new skills, share knowledge and skills, and participate in a new form of cooperation (Ghosh, 2005). However, developers face barriers to joining these projects, including installing necessary tools, downloading code from a server, identifying and downloading dependencies, and configuring the build environment (Steinmacher et al., 2015;Von Krogh et al., 2003;Jergensen et al., 2011;Fagerholm et al., 2014). ...
Key to the effectiveness of crowdsourcing approaches for software engineering is workflow design, describing how complex work is organized into small, relatively independent microtasks. This paper, we introduce a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) workflow for accomplishing programming work through self-contained microtasks, implemented as a preconfigured environment called CrowdMicroservices. In our approach, a client, acting on behalf of a software team, describes a microservice as a set of endpoints with paths, requests, and responses. A crowd then implements the endpoints, identifying individual endpoint behaviors that they test, implement, debug, create new functions, and interact with persistence APIs as needed. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a feasibility study in which a small crowd worked to implement a small ToDo microservice. The crowd created an implementation with only four defects, completing 350 microtasks and implementing 13 functions. We discuss the implications of these findings for incorporating crowdsourced programming contributions into traditional software projects.
... The image of the population demographic is consistent across various sampling methods and studies. Around 98% of FOSS contributors are aged between 20 and 30 years [10,17,18]. ...
Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an established method to implement change in organizations. However, it cannot be applied in the open source (FOSS) communities, without adaptation to their particularities, especially to the specific control mechanisms developed in FOSS. FOSS communities are self-managed, and rely on consensus to reach decisions. This study proposes a PAR framework specifically tailored to FOSS communities. We successfully applied the framework to implement a set of quality assurance interventions in the Robot Operating System community. The framework we proposed is composed of three components, interventions design, democratization, and execution. We believe that this process will work for other FOSS communities too. We have learned that changing a particular aspect of a FOSS community is arduous. To achieve success the change must rally the community around it for support and attract motivated volunteers to implement the interventions.
... The largest body of research on FOSS has focused on the individual scale, investigating why FOSS developers -particularly volunteer developers -contribute to FOSS projects. Examples of this stream of research include (but are by no means limited to) Ghosh [2005]; Lakhani and Wolf [2005]; and Chakravarty, Haruvy, et al. [2007]. The idea that volunteer programmers would freely contribute their intellectual property puzzled, in particular, economists (see, for example, Lerner and Tirole [2005a]). ...
We seek to establish a national program for research into the science of open source
systems.
Open source systems are beginning to appear in many diverse disciplines, though
perhaps the area with the highest level of activity, visibility, and impact is free/open
source software (FOSS) systems. FOSS systems are being researched and developed
by fast growing communities of academic and industrial practitioners in different
disciplines. However, FOSS systems are much more than just source code, or software
applications; they are better understood as packages of interrelated social and technical
resources that interact and overlap, and that can occasionally give rise to profound
consequences. This report addresses and elaborates on the nature of FOSS systems in
order to identify the questions and problems that will guide research in this domain over
the next five to ten years. Further, it provides a set of recommendations for action
targeted to FOSS researchers, research agencies, and others involved in scientific
research and technology development.
How are FOSS systems developed?, How do people working at a distance from each
other build them? How does such work draw on surrounding webs of resources and
socio-technical relationships? How do these systems evolve over time? These are
questions of growing importance to the future of software engineering, education,
innovation, science, society, and government. This report details the published research
studies and the open research problems that together describe the current state of
scientific knowledge about FOSS systems. Yet as FOSS systems permeate more
aspects of science, technology, society, and government, we will be limited in our
collective ability to explain, rationalize, predict, control, develop and transfer these
systems. Consequently, we identify and recommend the research studies, research
infrastructures, and other resources needed to expand the scientific knowledge we have
started to produce.
... The image of the population demographic is consistent across various sampling methods and studies. Around 98% of FOSS contributors are aged between 20 and 30 years [10,17,18]. ...
Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an established method to implement change in organizations. However, it cannot be applied in the open source (FOSS) communities, without adaptation to their particularities, especially to the specific control mechanisms developed in FOSS. FOSS communities are self-managed, and rely on consensus to reach decisions. This study proposes a PAR framework specifically tailored to FOSS communities. We successfully applied the framework to implement a set of quality assurance interventions in the Robot Operating System community. The framework we proposed is composed of three components, interventions design, democratization, and execution. We believe that this process will work for other FOSS communities too. We have learned that changing a particular aspect of a FOSS community is arduous. To achieve success the change must rally the community around it for support and attract motivated volunteers to implement the interventions.
... Lattemann e Stieglitz [2005] propuseram que os papéis que os colaboradores desempenharam em seu trabalho estão relacionados à motivação, sendo que programadores (ex: ao contrário de gerentes) foram motivados pelo reconhecimento dos pares. Diversos surveys evidenciaram que a aprendizagem em si motivou os indivíduos à colaboração com SL (ex: [Ghosh 2003;Misirli et al. 2014;Oreg and Nov 2008]). Tirole e Lerner [2002] derivaram da teoria econômica que os desenvolvedores de SL foram motivados pela alavancagem da carreira, participando de projetos de SL como uma forma de sinalizar seus talentos a potenciais empregadores. ...
Os programas Summer of Code, programas intensivos de desenvolvimento de software de curta duração, podem não apenas promover o desenvolvimento, mas também inspirar o engajamento de estudantes em projetos de software livre. Neste artigo, realizamos um survey com estudantes e mentores do Google Summer of Code (GSoC) para descobrir se os estudantes continuam a colaborar após o término do programa, bem como entender o que os atrai a participarem do GSoC. Escolhemos o GSoC porque ele provê a seus estudantes uma rara combinação de recompensas de participação incluindo desenvolvimento de habilidades técnicas, alavancagem da carreira, reconhecimento pelos pares e pagamento. Usamos estatística descritiva para analisar as respostas de estudantes e mentores. Nossos resultados sugerem que a principal motivação dos estudantes participarem do GSoC tem relação com alavancagem da carreira, utilizando as habilidades técnicas adquiridas para sinalizar seus talentos a empregadores. Entretanto, também constatamos que a intenção dos estudantes de continuar colaborando com projetos de software livre é forte.
... We used questionnaires as a data collection method, following Fink's advice on how to design surveys ( Fink, 1995 ). We asked students 7 about their contributions to OSS before and after GSoC (questions 1-5) and general questions about their participation in GSoC (questions 6-13). ...
Several open source software (OSS) projects participate in engagement programs like Summers of Code expecting to foster newcomers’ onboarding and receive contributions. However, scant empirical evidence identifies why students join such programs. In this paper, we study the well-established Google Summer of Code (GSoC), which is a 3-month OSS engagement program that offers stipends and mentorship to students willing to contribute to OSS projects. We combined a survey (of students and mentors) and interviews (of students) to understand what motivates students to enter GSoC. Our results show that students enter GSoC for an enriching experience, and not necessarily to become frequent contributors. Our data suggest that, while stipends are an important motivator, students participate for work experience and the ability to enhance their resumés. We also discuss practical implications for students, mentors, OSS projects, and Summer of Code programs.
... A wide range of volunteers, paid developers, or contract developers might participate in crowd development projects. Studies provided a list of motives for developers, such as the desire to learn and develop new skills, to share knowledge and skills, and participate in a new form of cooperation [8]. Moreover, inspired by gamification [6], crowds work on microtasks and gain points. ...
Key to the effectiveness of crowdsourcing approaches for software engineering is workflow design, describing how complex work is organized into small, relatively independent microtasks. In this pa- per, we introduce a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) workflow for accomplishing programming work through self-contained microtasks. In our approach, a client, acting on behalf of a software team, describes a microservice as a set of endpoints with paths, requests, and responses. A crowd then implements the endpoints, identifying individual endpoint behaviors which they test, implement, and debug, creating new functions and interacting with persistence APIs as needed. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a feasibility study in which a small crowd worked to implement a small todo microservice. The crowd created an implementation with only four defects, completing 350 micro- tasks and implementing 13 functions. We discuss the implications of these findings for incorporating crowdsourced programming contributions into traditional software projects.
... This stream of research is driven by both a desire to understand the psychological forces at play in online communities as well as solve the commonly witnessed under-contribution problem (Ling et al. 2005). Previous research has identified several motivations that include career improvement (Wasko and Faraj 2005), possible financial gain (Baldwin and Clark 2006), a desire to increase reputation (Hemetsberger 2002), learning and personal needs (Ghosh 2005), or altruism and other internal motives such as looking for fun or a desire to share knowledge (Hemetsberger 2002). Von Krogh et al. (2012) provide a review of motivation literature and classify motivations into intrinsic (e.g. ...
Online communities are sustained with the resources that members bring with them, yet
resources such as knowledge and effort are limited. With resources flowing through
interactions, we investigate how members decide to spend their limited resources in a
way that ensures gained value. We draw on social exchange theory and conversation of
resources theory to examine how online community members make social decisions
about spending their resources in the form of contributing to others. We argue that
members look for signals that suggest the likelihood for their acts of resource spending
to be rewarded or reciprocated. Looking at the dyadic level of analysis, we hypothesize
that members are more likely to spend their resources on others who portray a resource
giving behavior and those with similar or higher levels of resources. Empirically, we
operationalize the problem as a social network of resource spending and we test our
hypotheses using multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure. The results
suggest that relational factors show significance for tie formation between dyads even
after controlling for other well established individual factors such as centrality.
Through this research, we argue that dyadic relationships play an important role in
online community dynamics. We aim to contribute to a greater understanding of online
communities by investigating why certain collaborative ties form while others do not,
and how that leads to unique collaborative structures.
... Free software is developed through collaborative and informal networks of programmers. In addition, the software is collaboratively distributed, which means it is free for developers and users (Ghosh, 2007). Nevertheless, free software primarily concerns freedom and not necessarily whether it is free of charge (Free Software Foundation, 1996;Moglen, 1999). ...
Knowledge is an obtainable, renewable, dynamic, context‐dependent resource that can be shared, and the knowledge sharing cycle has 2 processes: knowledge donation, when a person voluntarily offers his/her intellectual capital to others, and knowledge collection, when a person consults other people's intellectual capital. Knowledge can be shared among individuals, groups, and organizations. A free software community is a type of community of practice arranged around a specific free software, where the knowledge shared is complex and the knowledge sharing processes have scarcely been studied. This investigation aims to identify the profiles of knowledge sharing processes in free software communities and examine how 6 motivations for sharing knowledge in free software communities are associated with each of the clusters. To accomplish this objective, a survey method was adopted, with 260 respondents belonging to free software communities. Cluster analysis was used to interpret the data. Four clusters were identified: Sporadic Sharer; Collector; Donator; and Constant Sharer. With the exception of the Sporadic Sharer, all the clusters presented high values of both collection and donation, including the Donators and Collectors. These results confirm the view of free software communities as communities of practice and highlight the importance of knowledge sharing in free software development cycle. The results reveal the importance of the Constant Sharer profile, which has the highest rates of donation and collection and is also the profile in which all the motivations appear with the highest values, indicating its key role in the functioning of free software communities.
... For instance, in the FOSS economy -around which foundations, industries and business models have already been developed (Maxwell 2006;Ghosh 2005;Riehle 2007) creating a more complicated but mature (compared to other Commons-based projects) ecosystemthe software that is produced substitutes the proprietary one, whereas the monetary returns are less than the potential monetary value of the substituted proprietary software (i.e. its exchange value if it was to be sold in the market were there no FOSS). It creates an economy with explosions of use value for the Commons-based community, society in general and the firms who take advantage of the produced use value. ...
Following the theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts (TEPS), this paper calls attention to the phenomenon of Commons-based peer production (CBPP). In the context of the current paradigm, it argues that civil society can play an important role in creating favourable conditions for a more sustainable global knowledge society. Approaching tentatively the ways in which 3D printing and other desktop manufacturing technologies can be used in CBPP, it also explores the ways in which the partnership with the state may provide a supportive innovative institutional basis for taking the maximum advantage of the emerging synergies in the vein of TEPS theory.
... Stewart and Gosain [35] found that open source participants adhere to this ideology. David et al. [36], David and Shapiro [37], Ghosh [38], and Ghosh et al.'s [39] surveys suggest that members' participation motives have underpinning ideological beliefs. OSS ideology needs to be analyzed, and its underlying beliefs and norms must be acknowledged before the design and the implementation of software engineering practices in OSS communities. ...
ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open source community in robotics that is developing standard robotics operating system facilities such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, communication middleware, and a wide range of software components for robotics functionality. This paper studies the quality assurance practices of the ROS community. We use qualitative methods to understand how ideology, priorities of the community, culture, sustainability, complexity, and adaptability of the community affect the implementation of quality assurance practices. Our analysis suggests that software engineering practices require social and cultural alignment and adaptation to the community particularities to achieve seamless implementation in open source environments. This alignment should be incorporated into the design and implementation of quality assurance practices in open source communities. KEYWORDS
... Interestingly, respondents are divided in two major groups of professionals in non-profit (55%) and forprofit sectors (45%). Younger age groups and gender disparity represent patterns, which have been observed in many surveys conducted with members of OH and FOSS communities (OSHW Community Survey 2012, 2013, Ghosh, 2005, Nafus et al., 2006. There is a concentration of respondents in their 20's, 30's, and 40's. ...
In this article, we explore the concept of Open Hardware (OH) as an experimental innovation platform to take a first step in the study of the institutional and sociotechnical conditions for fostering and advancing Free and Open Source projects at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. For our purposes, OH will be described as a highly adaptable platform for present and future research infrastructures. As part of the contemporary movement for “Open Science,” OH will be examined with respect to its actual and potential contributions to the development of common tools and infrastructures for large-scale scientific collaborations. The primary data we use was gathered by the CERN Knowledge Transfer group in October 2016 through an online survey in addition to face-to-face interviews. Our preliminary findings point to the need for establishing different modes of institutional support beyond CERN and outside the hobbyist market to help advance cultures of collaborative hardware development in the sciences.
... This feedback mechanism would encourage contributors to expend additional effort to perfect their code, so they can attract more favorable feedback in turn. Similarly, the survey of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) (Ghosh, 2005) pointed out that 53.2% of the developers express social or community-related motives, such as sharing knowledge and skills. In the long run, the abilities and skills of OSS contributors can undergo significant improvement, which leads to better job opportunities and higher salaries (Hertel et al., 2003). ...
The Internet based cyber-physical world has profoundly changed the information environment for the development of artificial intelligence (AI), bringing a new wave of AI research and promoting it into the new era of AI 2.0. As one of the most prominent characteristics of research in AI 2.0 era, crowd intelligence has attracted much attention from both industry and research communities. Specifically, crowd intelligence provides a novel problem-solving paradigm through gathering the intelligence of crowds to address challenges. In particular, due to the rapid development of the sharing economy, crowd intelligence not only becomes a new approach to solving scientific challenges, but has also been integrated into all kinds of application scenarios in daily life, e.g., online-to-offline (O2O) application, real-time traffic monitoring, and logistics management. In this paper, we survey existing studies of crowd intelligence. First, we describe the concept of crowd intelligence, and explain its relationship to the existing related concepts, e.g., crowdsourcing and human computation. Then, we introduce four categories of representative crowd intelligence platforms. We summarize three core research problems and the state-of-the-art techniques of crowd intelligence. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions of crowd intelligence.
Understanding the values that collaborators bring to a collaboration is important for the design of new systems. In collaborative systems understanding differing values could help design solutions to mitigate conflicts and more effectively coordinate collaboration. We review prior studies of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) identifying four common value dimensions previously noted as present in CBPP: usage value, social value, ideological value, and monetary value. We use this synthetic framework to analyze a dataset of 32 interviews with contributors to Wikimedia Commons and editors of Wikipedia who use Commons resources. Our analysis supports the prior values categories while expanding how some dimensions are expressed by participants. We also highlight four additional value dimensions that were not previously identified in CBPP: cultural heritage value, rarity value, aesthetic value, and administrative value. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of collaborative systems.
Objective: The decreased number of dopamine receptors in the putamen are considered to play an important role in the pathophysiology of restless legs syndrome (RLS). Retinal dopamine plays an important role in contrast sensitivity (CS) by establishing communication between retinal cells. It is also suggested that retinal dopaminergic neurons protect other retinal neurons. In this study, we aimed to investigate the thickness of retinal layers and CS function (CSF) of patients with RLS.
Materials and Methods: A total of 68 participants were included in this prospective case-control study. The participants were divided into two groups as those with RLS (n=35) in group 1 and control subjects (n=33) in group 2. Optical coherence tomography was used to measure central macular thickness, retinal nerve fiber layer thickness (RNFL), and retinal ganglion cell inner plexiform layer thickness (GCIPL). RNFL thickness was measured as average and as sectoral (superior, inferior, nasal and temporal). Additionally, the CS test measured at all spatial frequencies of 1.5, 3, 6, 12 and 18 cycle per degree (cpd) was performed in all participants.
Results: The average and superior sectoral RNFL thicknesses in group 1 were statistically significantly thinner than group 2 (p=0.03 and p=0.01 respectively). However, the thicknesses of other RNFL sectors were not different between group 1 and group 2. There were no statistically significant differences between group 1 and group 2 regarding the thicknesses of GCIPL and central macula. The mean values of CSF at all spatial frequencies of 1.5 cpd, 3 cpd, 6 cpd, 12 cpd and 18 cpd were statistically significantly higher in group 2 in comparison to group 1 (p
Software platforms regularly introduce new features to remain competitive. While platform innovation is considered to be a critical success factor, adding certain features could hurt the ecosystem. If platform owners provide functionality that was previously provided by a contributor, the owners enter complementary product spaces. Complementary market entry frequently occurs on software platforms and is a major concern for third-party developers.
The purpose of this study is to explore the integration of free and open source software Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) (FOSS) with the daily teaching and curriculum developmentcurriculum development in order to improve teaching effectiveness. The methods of questionnaire survey, semi-structured interview and focus group discussion were used in this project. A total of 35 participants, including teaching faculty, research staff, teachers and students, from the general education Educationprogramme in Chu Hai College of Higher Educationhigher education were selected and actively involved in this project. The project started in September 2018 and a number of free and open source educationEducation software promotion activities and training workshops were provided. Both quantitative and qualitative data through questionnaire survey and interview were collected. The quantitative data were analyzed by using SPSS version 22, while qualitative data were used as supplement. It was found from this study that the majority of learners were positive about FOSSFree and Open Source Software (FOSS)and agreed that FOSSFree and Open Source Software (FOSS) was easy to learn, convenient to use and conducive to learn. It is hoped that the research results could bring some insights and inspiration to the implementation and application of FOSSFree and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Chu Hai College of Higher Educationhigher education.
Web 2.0 technologies—what we prefer to call the “Interactive Web”—have become frequently used tools in the public sector. These tools include social networking applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikis, or RSS feeds. Public sector agencies are using blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis to coordinate work or share expertise and intelligence information, and social networking sites to communicate with citizens. These kinds of applications create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies, and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations and specific reporting structures, and therefore usually delayed through the filter of bureaucratic constraints. The authors provide an overview of drivers encouraging the adoption of Interactive Web applications, but also transformative organizational, technological, and informational challenges ahead that might lead to resistance to that change.
This chapter analyses the rationales behind software development. It is argued that open source software constitutes a sort of public space where programmers display their technical skills and build up a self-image. The ideological side of software development is also explored. It is shown how programmers try to construct an image of responsible scientists providing academics and clinicians with socially beneficial software packages. Finally, I analyse the social roots of the idea of development communities.
In this introductory part, I present the book’s goals. The issues of neuroimaging, neuroimaging software, computer programming, and open source, are initially presented. After a brief description of the methods employed, I give an outline of the book’s structure.
It is known that software development entails much collaborative work. However, the nature and manifestations of such collaborations have not been analysed in detail. This is the task of this chapter. I show the manifold ways in which developers share code and information, provide each other with technical help, use online platforms to launch and join open source projects, and organize the work of development teams. The issue of modularization (division of software development projects into specialized parts) is analysed. Finally, the chapter introduces the idea of software flexibility with which I classify different development projects based on the levels of collaboration between programmers.
This chapter shows how some universities try and manage to take possession of the coding work performed by their researchers. In this way, personal software development projects end up becoming one of the immaterial resources controlled by universities. The importance of economic funding and academic prestige for software development is analysed. Finally, I scrutinize how some neuroimaging software packages, produced in prestigious universities, have turned into gold standards of neuroimaging analysis, as well as the academic and political consequences of such phenomenon.
This final chapter focuses on software use. Initially, it is explained that the figures of software developer and software user are frequently mixed up in neuroimaging. I analyse the active role played by software users, on whom the evolution of most software packages depends. I reveal the occurrence of spontaneous and informal initiatives of mutual technical support in academic groups. Finally, I shed light on the precarious computing knowledge held by many neuroimaging researchers, showing that many researchers end up becoming dependent on software packages they fail to fully understand. Finally, the chapter discusses the difference between scientific actions (strategic decisions by people having deep programming knowledge) and scientific behaviour (the need to follow ready-made methodological protocols).
p class="3">The use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), a subset of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), can reduce the cost of purchasing software. Despite the benefit in the initial purchase price of software, deploying software requires total cost that goes beyond the initial purchase price. Total cost is a silent issue of FOSS and can only be evaluated in the particular environment in which it is adopted, in this case Kerala, India, fora state-level FOSS project called IT@School. This project is one of the largest deployments of free open source software FOSS-based ICT education in the world and impacts 6 million students and 200,000 teachers every year. This study analyzes the perception of 43 senior FOSS implementation project officials. It details how FOSS was introduced and reports on major challenges and how those challenges were overcome in a secondary educational setting in India. Email interviews, document analysis, and online case studies were used to collect the data. The lack of adequate resources to train the teachers was the single biggest challenge in the adoption of FOSS. The emerging strategies for efficient FOSS implementation could be used in other states in India and in other developing countries.</p
User-generated content (UGC) projects involve large numbers of mostly unpaid contributors collaborating to create content. Motivation for such contributions has been an active area of research. In prior research, motivation for contribution to UGC has been considered a single, static and individual phenomenon. In this paper, we argue that it is instead three separate but interrelated phenomena. Using the theory of helping behaviour as a framework and integrating social movement theory, we propose a stage theory that distinguishes three separate sets (initial, sustained and meta) of motivations for participation in UGC. We test this theory using a data set from a Wikimedia Editor Survey (Wikimedia Foundation, 2011). The results suggest several opportunities for further refinement of the theory but provide support for the main hypothesis, that different stages of contribution have distinct motives. The theory has implications for both researchers and practitioners who manage UGC projects.
Why do some people with stable professional activity participate in open source projects? The case of teachers in these types of communities show the evolution of motivation between two periods. During their first years, teachers are animated by a social motivation to use digital tools which broadcast their teaching contents widely. In the following years, teachers tend to be even more animated by their wish to contribute to collective activities as related to their professional focus. However, to maintain and develop the community's possibilities, a part of the contributor's time tends to remain involved in activities distant from the school's core issues. This finding contributes to the field of open source studies, and it concerns the individual's involvement motivation. Looking in detail about the organizational process, reveals that contributors are embedded in their communities from the outset until final institutionalization.
This paper presents data gathered from a detailed study of the structure and composition of the Linux kernel developer community, as sampled through three versions of the Linux kernel. Based on previously defined methodology and tools, data is presented on the distribution of authorship across modules, the degree of collaboration between authors, and the distribution, structure and inter-dependence of modules. Using successive versions as a proxy for time, the evolution of author contribution and module structure is also presented. Specific further analysis addresses two questions: the factors behind uncredited (unsigned) source code, and the changes in composition of the "core" and "periphery" author groups across successive versions.
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
Free software is supposedly developed by a loosely organised "community" of programmers. However it has been quite unknown until now who, except for some well-known celebrities, belongs to this community, and more importantly how contributions are distributed. The authors present a first survey of free software authorship, with the emphasis not on building a census or even a "hall of fame", but on identifying patterns of concentration and distribution of contribution. The sample code size is not necessarily representative and there are several errors due to the automated and vast nature of the task of identifying and crediting authors. Nevertheless, comprehensive data is collated for the first time, and can be scrutinised in detail on the survey Web site.
There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on "career concerns", and industrial organization theory can explain many of these projects' features. We conclude by listing interesting research questions related to open source software. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
this paper are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis or the U.S. Department of Commerce. 1.
The paper explains why open source software is an instance of a potentially broader phenomenon. Specifically, I suggest that nonproprietary peer-production of information and cultural materials will likely be a ubiquitous phenomenon in a pervasively networked society. I describe a number of such enterprises, at various stages of the information production value chain. These enterprises suggest that incentives to engage in nonproprietary peer production are trivial as long as enough contributors can be organized to contribute. This implies that the limit on the reach of peer production efforts is the modularity, granularity, and cost of integration of a good produced, not its total cost. I also suggest reasons to think that peer-production can have systematic advantages over both property-based markets and corporate managerial hierarchies as a method of organizing information and cultural production in a networked environment, because it is a better mechanism for clearing information about human capital available to work on existing information inputs to produce new outputs, and because it permits largers sets of agents to use larger sets of resources where there are increasing returns to the scale of both the set of agents and the set of resources available for work on projects. As capital costs and communications costs decrease in importance as factors of information production, the relative advantage of peer production in clearing human capital becomes more salient.
The Hi-Tech Gift Economy Survey of free software/open source developers conducted by the Boston Consulting Group; see http
- Richard Barbrook
Barbrook, Richard, 1998, " The Hi-Tech Gift Economy ", First Monday, vol. 3 number 12 (December),
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/
BCG 2002, Survey of free software/open source developers conducted by the Boston Consulting
Group; see http://www.osdn.com/bcg/
Community above Profits: Characteristics and Motivations of Open Source and Free Software Developers
- Rishab A Ghosh
- Ruediger Glott
- Bernhard Krieger
- Gregorio Robles
Ghosh, Rishab A., Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger & Gregorio Robles, 2003, " Community above
Profits: Characteristics and Motivations of Open Source and Free Software Developers ",
MERIT/Infonomics Working Paper, draft available at http://floss.infonomics.nl/papers/
WIDI: Who Is Doing It?
- Gregorio Robles-Martínez
Robles-Martínez, Gregorio. et al, 2001, " WIDI: Who Is Doing It? ", Technical University of Berlin,
http://widi.berlios.de/paper/study.html
Who is an open source software developer? Communications of the ACM FLOSS: Free/Libre/Open Source Software Study
- Bert J Dempsey
- Debra Weiss
- Paul Jones
- Jane Greenberg
Dempsey, Bert J, Debra Weiss, Paul Jones, and Jane Greenberg, 2002, " Who is an open source
software developer? " Communications of the ACM. April, 2002.
http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/develpro.html
FLOSS: Free/Libre/Open Source Software Study, Rishab Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger &
Gregorio Robles, 2002, International Institute of Infonomics/MERIT, http://floss.infonomics.nl/report/
Cooking pot markets: an economic model for the trade in free goods and services on the Internet, in: First Monday Clustering and Dependencies in Free/Open Source Software Development: Methodology and Tools
- Rishab Ghosh
- Aiyer
Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, 1998, Cooking pot markets: an economic model for the trade in free goods and
services on the Internet, in: First Monday, volume 3, number 3 (March),
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/index.html
Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, 2002, " Clustering and Dependencies in Free/Open Source Software
Development: Methodology and Tools ", SIEPR-Project NOSTRA Working Paper, draft available at
http://dxm.org/papers/toulouse2/
The rise of an information barter economy
- Rishab Ghosh
- Aiyer
Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, 1994. "The rise of an information barter economy", Electric Dreams, #37 (21
Implicit transactions need money you can give away Electric Dreams
- Rishab Ghosh
- Aiyer
Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, 1995. "Implicit transactions need money you can give away", Electric Dreams,
#70 (21 August), at http://dxm.org/dreams/dreams70.html
Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, 1996, Informal law and equal-opportunity enforcement in cyberspace,
unpublished manuscript