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Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort ...

Source: freesoftware.mit.edu
Topic: Motivation

Sort Desciption: The subject of intrinsic motivation has been well studied in psychology (for ... Closely related to enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation is a sense of ...

Content Inside: Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects 1 By Karim R. Lakhani* and Robert G Wolf ** *MIT Sloan School of Management | The Boston Consulting Group <karim.lakhani@sloan.mit.edu> **The Boston Consulting Group <wolf.bob@bcg.com> In Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (2005) edited by J. Feller B. Fitzgerald S. Hissam and K. R. Lakhani (MIT Press) 1 We would like to thank the developers on the SourceForge.net F/OSS projects for being so generous with their time while answering our survey. We would also like to thank the following colleagues for their helpful comments and feedback during the early versions of this chapter: Jeff Bates Jim Bessen Paul Carlile Jonathon Cummings Joao Cunha Chris DiBona Jesper Sorensen and Eric von Hippel. The following colleagues at BCG were extremely helpful during the study: Mark Blaxill Emily Case Philip Evans and Kelly Gittlein. Mistakes and errors remain ours. Karim Lakhani would like to acknowledge Canadas Social Science and Humanities Research Council for their generous support. 2 Abstract: In this paper we report on the results of a study of the effort and motivations of individuals to contributing to the creation of Free/Open Source software. We used a Web-based survey administered to 684 software developers in 287 F/OSS projects to learn what lies behind the effort put into such projects. Academic theorizing on individual motivations for participating in F/OSS projects has posited that external motivational factors in the form of extrinsic benefits (e.g.; better jobs career advancement) are the main drivers of effort. We find in contrast that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation namely how creative a person feels when working on the project is the strongest and most pervasive driver. We also find that user need intellectual stimulation derived from writing code and improving programming skills are top motivators for project ...

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