Working for free? Motivations of participating in open source projects

The appropriation of GitHub for curation

“…Internal factors (i.e., altruism, community identification, and intrinsic motivation) and external rewards (i.e., personal needs and peer recognition) are identified as motivating factors in software developers' participation in open source software projects (Hars & Ou, 2001). In this study, our participants confirmed altruism (62.5%), personal needs (93.8%), and peer recognition (31.2%) motivated their participation in curation projects.…”

“…Researchers report two main categories of motivations that drive software developers' voluntary participation in open source software projects: (1) internal motivations, i.e., intrinsic motivations, altruism, and community identification, and (2) external rewards, including expected future rewards and personal needs (Hars & Ou, 2001;Ye & Kishida, 2003). Internal factors include ''intrinsic motivation'', which refers to the feeling of competence, satisfaction, and fulfillment as a motivator to participate in open source projects; ''altruism'' refers to software developers desire to care for others' welfare at own cost; and ''community identification'' refers to individual software developers' alignment of goals with the larger community.…”

“…Internal factors include ''intrinsic motivation'', which refers to the feeling of competence, satisfaction, and fulfillment as a motivator to participate in open source projects; ''altruism'' refers to software developers desire to care for others' welfare at own cost; and ''community identification'' refers to individual software developers' alignment of goals with the larger community. External factors include ''future rewards'' that are inured when software developers view their participation as investment, and expected future returns, including revenues from related products and services, human capital, self-marketing, and peer recognition; ''Personal needs'' are software developers' personal demand for their activity, for example, Perl programming language and Apache web server both grew out of software developers' self-interests to support their work (Hars & Ou, 2001). Both internal and external factors are important motivations that drive software developers' participation in open source projects.…”

“…One primary motivation for engaging in curation is altruism, which is also widely recognized as an important motivation for software developers' participation in open source projects (Hars & Ou, 2001;Lakhani & Wolf, 2003;Ye & Kishida, 2003). This finding indicates that helping behaviors may be a common reason why software developers are motivated to participate in some online activities.…”

IoT and Robotics: a synergy

“…The Cloud facilitates sharing by humans of designs for hardware, data, and code. The success of open-source software [23] [24] [25] is now widely accepted in the robotics and automation community. A primary example is ROS, the Robot Operating System, which provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications [26] [27].…”