Hi everyone!
For me, the topic of this week was quite difficult since I had really no clue of what peer production and open source was. Luckily, the guest lectures by Mr van Baalen and Mr Zhang last Wednesday helped me to understand the articles of this week a bit more.
The four articles of this week were slightly overlapping, so I will discuss in this blog post the main objectives of the articles and will already give you some information of the two open source development organizations of my presentation tomorrow.
In the guest lecture, Mr van Baalen asked whether there will be a new type of organization in the future, which will result into a new productive system, whereby there are no prices or bosses? This system will consist of only open source software, which will be available to anyone online via the peer production. So, in the future, will there be a CONTROL-SHIFT? Unfortunately, there is still a battle between private and peer-2-peer organizations. Private organizations keep their property safe and controlled by implementing patents and copyright laws. Many more binary versions of software existed, and Richard Stallman viewed this as morally wrong thus came up with the idea to create a basic license called “General Public License (GPL)”, whereby the source code is again open and could be modified and exchanged for free (von Hippel & Von Krogh, 2003:210). This brings us to Linus Law, with the use of metaphors of a Cathedral (e.g. Microsoft) and a Bazaar (e.g. Linux). Why should we invest a lot of money in hunting bugs in the “Cathedral” (with only a few) when we are also able to work with thousands of people on projects (OSS), whereby bugs will be quickly discovered (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) (van Baalen)?
OK, so we are able to work with thousands of people on these open source projects. But then again, open source projects are mostly not rewarding, so what keeps people motivated to actually design new software and exchange it for free? Apparently, people have the need to contribute online (Wikipedia, Zhang & Zhu, 2011). Thousands of people are creating software/content online (von Hippel & Kogh). And, according to Osterloh & Rota (2007:164) this has to do with the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation people enjoy creating and editing the projects (satisfaction of needs) where, on the other hand, with extrinsic motivation contributors get money rewards or compensations. And explanation of why so many people are contributing online, is because of the chance a good contributor could get a great job offer.
Thus, will open source projects survive? Will contributors remain editing, designing and modifying? This questions was also coined to Mr Mickos (Hyatt, 2008:19). His reaction is that innovation is nothing new, so no, people will not get sick of open sourcing. And because of the highly interaction between contributors, innovation will continue, and thus new open source projects will…
The two open source development organizations which I will present tomorrow are SourceForge.net and LaunchPad. Possibly, one of you may know these websites. The two sites consists of making, adding, editing and exchanging software (such as Linux). However there are some slight differences between the two, similar looking, organizations. I will elaborate more on the two organizations tomorrow during my poster presentation.
See you all tomorrow!
Isabel Beijers, 335155
References
Zhang, M. and Zhu, F. 2011. Group size and incentives to contribute: A natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia. American Economic Review 101(4) 1601-1615.
von Hippel, E., and von Krogh, G. 2003. Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science. Organization Science 14(2) 209-223.
Osterloh, M., and Rota, S. 2007. Open source software development – Just another case of collective invention. Research Policy 36 157-171.
Hyatt, J. 2008. The oh-so-practical magic of open-source innovation. MIT Sloan Management Review 50(1) 15-19.
