Comparing Motivations of Individual Programmers and Firms to Take Part in the Open Source Movement. From Community to Business

33 Pages Posted: 19 Nov 2003

See all articles by Andrea Bonaccorsi

Andrea Bonaccorsi

Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa - Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM)

Cristina Rossi Lamastra

Politecnico di Milano

Abstract

Stallman proposed a revolutionary idea in 1984 with the "Free Software Foundation", subsequently confirmed in 1998 in the "Open Source Definition". The key concept is that there should be unrestricted access to computer programming codes: anyone should be able to use and modify them and circulate such modifications without having to pay any licence fee.

The first urgent question is therefore the one clearly put by Glass (1999, 104): "I don't know who these crazy people are who want to write, read and even revise all that code without being paid anything for it at all". The issue is undoubtedly challenging and computer scientists, sociologists, psychologists and economists show interest in the motivations that lay at the basis of the participation in the Open Source movement. A growing body of economic literature has been addressing the problem since when the phenomenon went out from universities and research centres and became "tremendously successful" (Lerner e Tirole, 2001, 819) creating new and often lucky business models.

A growing body of economic literature is addressing the incentives of the individuals that take part to the Open Source movement. However, empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (OSS). During 2002, we conducted a large-scale survey on 146 Italian firms supplying Open Source solutions in Italy. In this paper our data on firms' motivations are compared with data collected by the surveys made on individual programmers. We aim at analysing the role played by different classes of motivations (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement of different groups of agents in Open Source activities.

Keywords: Open Source developers, Open Source firms, incentives

JEL Classification: L86, O33

Suggested Citation

Bonaccorsi, Andrea and Rossi Lamastra, Cristina, Comparing Motivations of Individual Programmers and Firms to Take Part in the Open Source Movement. From Community to Business. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=460861 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.460861

Andrea Bonaccorsi

Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa - Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM) ( email )

Piazza Martiri della Liberta, 33
Pisa, I-56127
Italy
+39 05 088 3323 (Phone)
+39 05 088 3344 (Fax)

Cristina Rossi Lamastra (Contact Author)

Politecnico di Milano ( email )

Piazza Leonardo da Vinci
Milan, Milano 20100
Italy
+390223993972 (Phone)
+390223992710 (Fax)

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