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"Attitude, involvement and participation in business open source software projects: an empirical analysis of developers' behaviours"
Régis Meissonier, Emmanuel Houzé
International Conference on Innovation, Engineering Management and Technology, 26-28 mai 2010, Tokyo, Japan
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 implication. Then we assess perceived resulting satisfaction gained from participation both on individual performance and project achievement. 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. In the same vein, our results question the significant role of developer participation level on project completion and individual performance gains. Indeed the satisfaction level of the whole project team is observed as having a more significant influence on both performance variables.