3rd reading...

Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and

Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects1

Karim R. Lakhani* and Robert G Wolf **

*MIT Sloan School of Management | The Boston Consulting Group

**The Boston Consulting Group

September 2003

SUMMARY:
The research paper is all about the stating the outcomes of the study on what are the motivations behind the individuals for their continuous contribution to the Free/Open Source Software. In other words, what are the factors or what are the driving force to the developers to give their much time and effort in developing Free/Open Source Software.

What are the motivations of the F/OSS developers?

In the paper, they have stated and reviewed the two types of motivations. These are:

Intrinsic Motivation
From the word intrinsic this means a motivation that is found deep within a person. It stated there that when a person is intrinsically motivated, he/she is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external prods, pressures, or rewards. And again, according to Lindenberg 2001, intrinsic motivation is separated into two distinct components: 1. enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation and 2. obligation/ community-based intrinsic motivation.

According to Deci and Ryan 1985, the idea behind of the intrinsic motivation is having fun or enjoying oneself when taking part in an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1975) proposed a state of “flow”, in which enjoyment is maximized, characterized by intense and focused concentration; a merging of action and awareness; confidence in one’s ability; and the enjoyment of the activity itself regardless of the outcome.
On the other hand, the obligation/ community-based intrinsic motivation, according to LindenBerg (2001), he stated that individuals may be socialized into acting appropriately in a manner consistent with the norms of a group.

Extrinsic Motivation
The idea behind the extrinsic motivation is gaining rewards (whether direct or indirect) for doing a task or an activity. In other words, the developer is paid and most probably he/ she are given incentives for doing such activity.


How does the study done?
The researchers did a sample web-survey. The samples that are to be included in the survey was from the individuals listed as official developers on F/OSS projects that is found in SourceForge.net, the F/OSS community web site. The researchers sent personalized e-mails to each individual inviting them to participate in the survey. The researchers also provided or assigned a random personal identification number for accessing the survey. The first part of the survey was done from October 10-31,2001 generating 526 responses giving a response rate of 34.3% . The second survey was conducted on April 28, 2002 that generated 173 responses out of the 573 mails sent, giving a response rate of 30.0 %

The results:
According to their study, they’ve found out that 87 % of all the respondents received no direct payments, 55 % of them contributed code during their work time. The combination of those who received direct payments and those supervisors knew their work on the project created do consists of approximately 405 of the sample.

On the number of hours per week spent on a project, they’ve found out that the respondents spent an average of 14.1 hours on all their F/OSS projects and 7.5 hours on the focal project.

On the personal creativity and flow of the respondents, based on the research done, the respondents noted a very high sense of personal creativity in the focal projects. More than 61% of the respondents said that their participation in the focal F/OSS project was their most creative experience.

Motivations to contribute
With respect to the results of the said survey, the top single reason to contribute to projects is based on enjoyment-related intrinsic motivation: “Project code is intellectually stimulating to write” which gains 44.9 % of all the respondents. Improving programming skills, an extrinsic motivation related to human capital improvement, was a close second, with 41.8% of participants saying it was an important motivator. Approximately 20% of the sample indicated that working with the project team was also a motivation for their contribution.
Paid contributors are strongly motivated by work-related user need (56%) and value professional status (22.8%) more than volunteers. On the other hand, volunteers are more likely to participate because they are trying to improve their skills (45.8%) or need the software for non-work purposes (37%).

To end, the study shows what are the driving force of the developers to contribute to the F/OSS projects and what is good in here is that, whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, there are many people who contributes to the fast growing and success of the F/OSS community.

Evaluation:
The research paper really interests me that it shows the motivations that affect the developers to contribute to the continuing success of the F/OSS community. The research is very informative, complete in a sense that it gives the information on who are the respondents, the scope of the research as well the results and their conclusion.