پذیرش پاداش های پولی در توسعه نرم افزار منبع باز

The open source software (OSS) movement thrives on innovation and volunteer effort of developers. Scholars have expressed widespread concern about the sustainability of the OSS movement due to high levels of volunteerism. In this paper, we address a central challenge to the sustainability of OSS-developers’ acceptance of monetary rewards. We strive to explain why some OSS developers accept monetary rewards and others do not. Viewed through the theoretical lens of the private-collective innovation model (Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003 and Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2006), this allows us to describe when developers will accept private financial rewards. Our main research objective is to clearly map the web of relationships between causal antecedents, and developers’ acceptance behavior. Using a unique dataset that combines survey and behavioral measures, we find that – (a) intention to accept monetary rewards mediates the impact of motivational elements on developers’ acceptance of monetary rewards; (b) intrinsic and extrinsic motivations positively affect their intention to accept monetary rewards, community motivation negatively impacts intention and ideological motivation does not affect the intention to accept rewards and (c) these effects are obtained even after inclusion of several control variables. The theoretical and managerial implications of our work are described.

The central idea behind open source software is that greater market innovation results when developers are provided the necessary freedom to create new products (Raymond, 1998 and Ghosh, 1998). Developers work in loosely organized communities built on the private-collective innovation model, i.e., a “best of both worlds” scenario where programmers make private gains while contributing to the collective good (Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003 and Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2006) through “freely revealing” the source code for the product (Von Krogh and Von Hippel, 2006). Open source software “democratizes” the innovation process (Von Hippel, 2005) by making code freely available through diverse licensing arrangements (Krishnamurthy, 2003). The extensive and free distribution of the code allows a large group of individuals to examine and use software leading to a more reliable and robust product (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003 and Rossi, 2004). Unlike proprietary software, the open source software movement is characterized by a “diversity of project structures, diverse employment arrangements, co-existence of corporations and communities and co-existence of the creative and commercial elements” (Krishnamurthy, 2006). In contrast to the proprietary software regime where an organization makes a limited set of strategic choices, open source promotes multiple innovation trajectories. The open source literature has provided different perspectives on the relative place of private vs. collective rewards to the developer. The early characterizations described an altruistic, community-minded developer interested in purely collective gains through volunteerism (Raymond, 1998 and Ghosh, 1998). Of late, the focus has turned to the sustainability of the open source software movement, i.e., whether open source innovation can sustain if developers are not making private gains. Scholars have expressed widespread concern about the sustainability of the OSS movement due to high levels of volunteerism (Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003). It has been argued that while open source developers may derive joy from coding and might be ideologically motivated, many may “simply wish to earn a reasonable livelihood from their efforts” (Fitzgerald, 2006). In the current system where open source and proprietary software often co-exist in the same marketplace (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003), corporations may be “harvesting the altruism” of volunteer developers (Haruvy et al., 2003) leading to a system with “altruistic individuals and selfish firms” (Rossi and Bonaccorsi, 2005 and Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2004). There is a traditional free-rider problem in this situation where corporations often benefit from the source code of open source software without providing any compensation to the developers (Haruvy et al., 2008). Financial incentives in the open source landscape (i.e., the pathways to private financial gain) are of many types. They can be categorized based on the distribution pattern (all or few), type of provider (corporation, individual), contingent or fixed and conditional or not (Krishnamurthy, 2006). Open source developers might be paid a fixed salary by a non-profit organization or for-profit corporation (Roberts et al., 2006), offered a bounty to solve a particular problem (Krishnamurthy and Tripathi, 2006) or be paid through voluntary contributions (Krishnamurthy and Tripathi, 2009). Theoretically, our view is that these differences matter in our understanding of when developers will accept private financial rewards. The implicit assumption made by the literature thus far (e.g., Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003) is that when financial rewards are made available to open source developers, they will simply accept them. Put otherwise, the literature has examined the provision of and not the acceptance of these incentives. Interestingly, empirical data show that not all developers accept financial incentives when they are provided. Consider the case of Mozilla which offers a regular bounty to identify bugs in its code. A news story reports that 10–15% of participants turn down the financial rewards. 1 This is a poorly understood phenomenon and ties directly to the sustainability of the OSS movement. The implications for the private-collective innovation model ( Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003) when many developers do not accept financial incentives are considerable. In effect, it switches from the private-collective innovation model to simply the collective innovation model ( Osterloh and Rota, 2006) when this happens. Therefore, our work helps deepen our understanding of the relative place of private and collective rewards in the open source ecosystem. This research is also managerially relevant. Understanding why OSS developers do not accept incentives will afford companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and policy makers an opportunity to rethink their strategies. For one, companies are investing considerable amounts in this arena with the hope of attracting developers. These companies assume that developers will be attracted to these financial rewards. However, if there is systematic self-selection due to acceptance behavior, results might be different from what was intended or predicted. If acceptance behavior effects are massive, the resulting self-selection might jeopardize the network externality that companies might be counting on for rapid product development and diffusion (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003, Dahlander, 2007 and Bitzer et al., 2007). In order to deepen our understanding, we begin with a short qualitative study. We find there is considerable diversity of opinion on how developers should be compensated. Not surprisingly, the fiercely independent open source developers themselves do not agree on one optimal arrangement. Table 1 summarizes open-ended responses to the question – “How should open source developers be paid?” This is based on survey data we gathered from OSS developers.Interestingly, one respondent explicitly argues that open source developers should not be paid. This confirms our intuition that not all developers are likely to accept all financial incentives. Based on our analysis, we identified ten themes from the qualitative data – no compensation, voluntary monetary rewards, plurality of methods, rewards in kind, subscription, salary/bounty, pay-for-service, contextual support, consensus-based decision and software sales. It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze the developers’ relationship with these nine different types of financial incentives. We focus on one of the identified sources of payment – voluntary monetary rewards. Our research interest in this paper is to identify developers’ acceptance behavior as central to the discourse on OSS sustainability and to clearly map the web of relationships between causal antecedents, and acceptance behavior. We examine how motivations drive developers to accept voluntary monetary rewards for their work on OSS projects. Through this paper, we make the following contributions – (1) we identify acceptance behavior as requiring special attention within the open source literature, (2) we propose a scale to measure the intention to accept financial incentives, (3) we identify the impact of various established motivational components on acceptance behavior, and (4) we provide an empirical study using a dataset that combines attitudinal and behavioral variables from multiple sources to answer our research questions.

The private-collective innovation model (Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003 and Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2006) argues for a mix of private and collective gains in the open source innovation model. Our work indicates that the type of incentive matters immensely in this tradeoff, i.e., it is not just the size of the incentive, but how it is structured. Since voluntary monetary rewards are provided by users, such rewards can be “supportive” of the open source innovation system (Frey and Jegen, 2001 and Benabou and Tirole, 2003). Those who provide these rewards do not set the innovation agenda for the project, nor do they control changes to the code. Future research must examine developers’ relationship with other types of rewards. The open source literature has suggested that by not providing developers adequate financial rewards, corporations might be exploiting altruistic individuals (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003, 2005; Haruvy et al., 2003). Our findings highlight a greater degree of complexity in this phenomenon than was initially understood. By demonstrating that some developers choose to accept rewards and others do not, we introduce the volition of the individual programmer as an important variable. What appears as “harvesting altruism” (Haruvy et al., 2003), might be the result of a developer voluntarily choosing to not accept the reward for various reasons. The freedom inherent in open source innovation is well documented (e.g., Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2003, Von Hippel and Von Krogh, 2006, Lerner and Tirole, 2002 and Osterloh and Rota, 2006). Usually, this is discussed in the context of software development, innovation or knowledge sharing. Our work demonstrates that these developers are also fiercely independent about their views of financial rewards. Not accepting rewards could be interpreted as developers exercising their freedom. It must be clarified that our findings do not invalidate the private-collective innovation model. Rather, we see a deepening of our understanding of the place of private gains vs. collective rewards in open source communities. Our paper should motivate a broader dialog about the antecedent factors that drive the acceptance of private vs. collective rewards. From a policy perspective, governments and NGOs seeking to expand open source development must understand that simply providing grant money is not going to solve all problems. Key developers might simply not accept this grant money – especially if they fear that this will lead to some sort of control on the innovation process. Governments and NGOs must engage deeply with open source communities to encourage further innovation. Significant research questions about the role of financial incentives in the OSS development model remain. Are the four motivational components (intrinsic, extrinsic, ideological and community) stable over time? Do developers behave differently with respect to various financial incentives? For instance, are those who accept monetary rewards also likely to participate in a bounty? How do OSS developers perceive those who accept rewards? Do such individuals loose or gain status? Does the magnitude of the financial incentives affect acceptance behavior? These and other research questions should be investigated in future research.