Carrots and Rainbows: Motivation and Social Practice in Open Source Software Development1

Open source 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…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• HB
  Harvard Business School
• UO
  University of Notre Dame
• CB
  Copenhagen Business School
• UO
  University of Cambridge
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
• UD
  Università degli Studi di Trento
• GU
  Göteborgs Universitet
• UB
  Università Bocconi
• SB
  Stanford Bio-X
• SI
  Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research