@article {1679, title = {Carrots and Rainbows: Motivation and Social Practice in Open Source Software Development}, journal = {Management Information Systems Quarterly}, volume = {36}, year = {2012}, pages = {649-676}, abstract = {Open source software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation{\textendash}practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS. }, url = {https://sspaeth.de/uploads/CarrotsAndRainbows.pdf}, author = {Georg von Krogh and Stefan Haefliger and Sebastian Spaeth and Martin W. Wallin} } @article {flosswp127, title = {Collective Action and Communal Resources in Open Source Software Development:The Case of Freenet}, year = {2003}, month = {November}, abstract = {Building on resource mobilization theory, we explore three distinct rewards for individuals to engage in innovative collective action, namely open source software development. The three rewards, which we term communal resources, are reputation, control over technology, and learning opportunities. The collective action (the open source software development project) produces the communal resources in parallel with the actual product (software) and mobilizes programmers to spend time and effort, and contribute their knowledge to the project. Communal resources appear as a byproduct to the production process and represent a public good of second order. We show that they increase in value for individuals along with their involvement in the community. Empirical data from Freenet, an open source software project for peer-to-peer software, illustrates both the levels of involvement and the communal resources.}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/vonkroghhaefligerspaeth.pdf}, author = {Georg von Krogh} } @article {146, title = {Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study}, journal = {Research Policy}, volume = {32}, number = {7}, year = {2003}, note = {first, telephone interviews "Secondly, we collected the project{\textquoteright}s public email conversations stored in the projects{\textquoteright} mailing lists which is archived on Freenet{\textquoteright}s website" "The third source of data included the history of changes to the software code available via the project{\textquoteright}s software repository within the CVS ({\textquoteleft}Concurrent Versioning System{\textquoteright}) source code management tool" "Fourthly, in order obtain contextual understanding of the project we collected publicly available documents related to open source in general and to the project in particular. Among the most important sources were the Freenet project web pages (e.g. the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)7), Ian Clarke{\textquoteright}s master thesis (1999), newspaper interviews with the core developers, and a technical paper (Clarke, Sandberg, Wiley, \& Hong, 2000) describing the Freenet project written by some of the developers."}, pages = {1217-1241}, abstract = {This paper develops an inductive theory of the open source software innovation process by focussing on the creation of Freenet, a project aimed at developing a decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer electronic file sharing network. We are particularly interested in the strategies and processes by which new people join the existing community of software developers, and how they initially contribute code. Analyzing data from multiple sources on the Freenet software development process, we generate the constructs of "joining script", We are grateful to helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers. We also thank Chris Argyris, John Seely Brown, Eric von Hippel, Stefan Haefliger, Petra Kugler, Heike Bruch, Simon Gchter, Simon Peck, and Hari Tsoukas for helpful comments and suggestions. Ben Ho and Craig Lebowitz provided technical assistance with data importation and parsing. We would like to thank Ian Clarke and the Freenet developers for their willingness to participate in our study and providing key insights into the open source development process. Karim R. Lakhani would like to acknowledge the generous support of The Boston Consulting Group and Canada{\textquoteright}s Social Science and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellowship. Georg von Krogh and Sebastian Spaeth acknowledge the generous support from the Research Foundation at the University of St. Gallen.}, keywords = {cvs, email, email archives, freenet, INNOVATION, mailing lists, roles, source code}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(03)00050-7}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/krogh03.pdf}, author = {Georg von Krogh and Spaeth, S. and Karim R Lakhani} } @article {flosswp74, title = {Community, Joining, and Specialization in Open Source Software Innovation: A Case Study}, journal = {RP Special Issue}, year = {2003}, month = {February}, abstract = {This paper develops an inductive theory of the open source software innovation process by focussing on the creation of Freenet, a project aimed at developing a decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer electronic file sharing network. We are particularly interested in the strategies and processes by which new people join the existing community of software developers, and how they initially contribute code. Analyzing data from multiple sources on the Freenet software development process, we generate the constructs of "joining script", "specialization", "contribution barriers", and "feature gifts", and propose relationships among these. Implications for theory and research are discussed.}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/rp-vonkroghspaethlakhani.pdf}, author = {Georg von Krogh} } @article {62, title = {Open Source Software and the {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}Private-Collective{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science}, journal = {Organization Science}, volume = {14}, number = {2}, year = {2003}, pages = {208--223}, publisher = {Tims Institute of Management Science}, author = {von Hippel, Eric and Georg von Krogh} }