This week’s subject for the home assignment for the minor Social Media and Social Networks is peer production and open source. Peer production relies mainly on self-organizing communities of individuals and is a way of producing goods and services. Open source is related to peer production. It also stands for a community of individuals, who are allowed act as users and developers at the same time.
The first article is written by Hyatt, J. (2008) and is an interview with MySQL chief Marten Mickos. According to Mickos, the four main reasons for programmers to contribute to MySQL in open source ways are to get the product they need, to build a reputation, to prove something to themselves and to get satisfaction from seeing their work have effect.
Hippel, von E. and Krogh, von G. wrote an article about open source software and the ‘’private-collective’’ innovation model: issues for organization science (2003). The private investment model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection, the collective action model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good.
The third article is about group size and incentives to contribute, based on a natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia, by Zhang, M. and Zhu. F (2011). The authors mention, that former literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size.
Each of the above mentioned articles focuses on one particular subject, involving open source software. I have become particularly interested in the ‘’puzzle’’ of why information providers are willing to perform a certain task for free. With help of my own research, I found that I can add up a learning part to the four main reasons mentioned in the first article. In the second article my finding was that because of working in a team, people become more motivated and they value their contribution to the team as very important.
I have chosen two cases that illustrate my subject of interest: how people are motivated to contribute on open source platforms, namely open source content management system Drupal and open source software Prestashop. These two are different, but they also make me understand why contributors would participate in a big community and solve problems for free.
- G, Niedner, S. and Herrmann, S. (2003), ‘’Motivation of Software Developers in Open Source Projects: an Internet-based Survey of Contributors to the Linux Kernel’’, Institur fuer Psychologie, p. 1159-1177
- Hippel, von E. and Krogh, von G. (2003), ‘’Open Source Software and the ‘’Private-Collective’’ Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science’’, Organization Science, 14(2) p. 209-223
- Hyatt, J. (2008), ‘’The Oh-So-Practical Magic of Open-Source Innovation’’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(1) p. 15-19
- Lakhani, K.R. and Hippel, von E. (2002), ‘’How Open Source Software Works: ‘’Free’’ User-to-User Assistance’’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 923-943
- Zhang, M. and Zhu, F. (2011), ‘’Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia’’, American Economic Review, 101(4) p. 1601-1615
- Websites, accessed 15th of Oktober at https://www.drupal.com/ and https://www.prestashop.com/
