Open Source Movement - Motivations of Programmers

Motivations of Programmers

With the growth and attention on the open source movement, the reasons and motivations of programmers for creating code for free has been under investigation. In a paper from the 15th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association on the open source movement, the incentives of programmers on an individual level as well as on a company or network level were analyzed. What is essentially the intellectual gift giving of talented programmers challenges the "self-interested-economic-agent paradigm," and has made both the public and economists search for an understanding of what the benefits are for programmers.

• Altruism: The argument for altruism is limited as an explanation because though some exists, the programmers do not focus their kindness on more charitable causes. If the generosity of working for free was a viable motivation for such a prevalent movement, it is curious why such a trend has not been seen in industries such as biotechnology that would have a much bigger impact on the public good.
• Community Sharing and Improvement: The online community is an environment that promotes continual improvements, modifications, and contributions to each other's work. A programmer can easily benefit from open source software because by making it public, other testers and subprograms can remove bugs, tailor code to other purposes, and find problems. This kind of peer editing feature of open source software promotes better programs and a higher standard of code.
• Recognition: Though a project may not be associated with a specific individual, the contributors are often recognized and marked on a project's server. This allows for programmers to receive public recognition for their skills, promoting career opportunities and exposure. In fact, the founders of Sun and Netscape began as open source programmers.
• Ego: "If they are somehow assigned to a trivial problem and that is their only possible task, they may spend six months coming up with a bewildering architecture...merely to show their friends and colleagues what a tough nut they are trying to crack." Ego-gratification has been cited as a relevant motivation of programmers because of their competitive community. An OSS (open source software) community has no clear distinction between developers and users, because all users are potential developers. There is a large community of programmers trying to essentially outshine or impress their colleagues. They enjoy having other programmers admire their works and accomplishments, contributing to why OSS projects have a recruiting advantage for unknown talent than a closed-source company.
• Creative Expression: Personal satisfaction also comes from the act of writing software as an equivalent to creative self-expression – it is almost equivalent to creating a work of art. The rediscovery of creativity, which has been lost through the mass production of commercial software products can be a relevant motivation.