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"Business Open source Software Projects: an empirical analysis of developers' behaviour"
Régis Meissonier, Emmanuel Houzé
4th International Conference of on Information Systems, 18-20 mars 2010, Porto, Portugal
Empirical research on OSS offers a large spectrum of extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors explaining why developers freely participate in software development. However, a large part of this literature focused on popular open source projects such as Linux, Apache, Red Hat, Firefox, etc, and less attention has been paid to the specificities of business OSS project. Referring to the Theory of Planned Behaviour and Social Cognitive Theory the objective of this article is to evaluate the influence of developer motivational factors on his/her participation level in open source business projects through his/her attitude and involvement. Literature analysis puts forward components of individual behaviour, intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors, and performance variables of open source projects. Empirical analysis corresponds to a survey carried out on 310 participants in open
source business projects hosted on the SourceForge web site. Compared to prior empirical research carried out on more popular open source software projects, our PLS analysis reveals some dissonant results. In particular, participatory behaviour is mainly associated with the motivation of reciprocity expected from peers while individual motivation such as learning expectancy, reputation gains, or ideology does not play a significant role.
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