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

Abstract

Stallman proposed a revolutionary idea in 1984 with the Free Software Foundation, subsequently confirmed in 1998 in the 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.