The effect of perceived justice on users’ contribution in open source software communities

Abstract

Users’ voluntary contribution of codes is crucial to the success of open source software (OSS) communities. However, users often lack the contribution motivation. The purpose of this research is to examine users’ contribution in OSS communities from a perceived justice perspective. We adopted a mixed method of structural equation modeling (SEM) and artificial neural network (ANN) to conduct data analysis. The results indicated that perceived justice, which includes distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice, has significant effects on trust and satisfaction, both of which further determine contribution intention. The results imply that OSS communities need to improve users’ perceived justice in order to facilitate their contribution behavior.