Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Discovering Statistics Using SPSS
Discovering Statistics Using SPSS
Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia
GROUP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
From Wikipedia to the classroom: exploring online publication and learning
ICLS '06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences
An empirical analysis of open source software developers' motivations and continuance intentions
Information and Management
Working for Free? Motivations for Participating in Open-Source Projects
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
CSCL'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computer supported collaborative learning - Volume 1
Personality traits and knowledge sharing in online communities
Computers in Human Behavior
Users' Acceptance and Use of Moodle: The Community Influence
International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education
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To learn about what drives people to devote their time and expertise to creating and supporting free/open source software, a survey with Likert-scaled items measuring different types of motivations was sent to contributors of several open source projects. Open-ended comments were used to illustrate the Likert-scaled items and open-ended questions allowed respondents to express their reasons for participating in these open source communities. Results indicate that the open source contributors (n=110, 38 paid to work on OSS projects and 72 volunteers) are motivated primarily by a sense of altruism as well as the desire to create and learn. Payment did not significantly impact the reasons for contributing to OSS projects. The comments and open-ended questions validated the findings and indicated that building a ''Utopian'' community - the desire to help for the greater good worldwide - is one of the most important motivators. Also, respondents revealed that they join and persist as members of open source communities because they enjoy the freedom to create and share free software, tools and knowledge with others inside and outside the community.