Reputation in Open Source Software

The 1990s and early 2000s have seen the dramatic rise of open source software, with the Linux operating system as the most salient example. This article focuses on the role of reputation in open source. It describes the importance of the reputations of hackers, software vendors, open source projects, and the open source movement. Although reputation has long been used as an explanation of hacker motivation, this article applies the concept of reputation at multiple levels, and identifies the inter-level relations.