The Shifting Sands of Motivation: Revisiting What Drives Contributors in Open Source
open source motivation incentive
Authors: Marco Gerosa, Igor Wiese, Bianca Trinkenreich, Georg Link, Gregorio Robles, Christoph Treude, Igor Steinmacher, Anita Sarma
Year: 2021
Published in: International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
Read me: DOI: 10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00098. Website.
Abstract: Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field’s understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from the early 2000s. With the changed landscape of OSS, it is very likely that motivations to join OSS have also evolved. Through a survey of 242 OSS contributors, we investigate shifts in motivation from three perspectives: (1) the impact of the new OSS landscape, (2) the impact of individuals’ personal growth as they become part of OSS communities, and (3) the impact of differences in individuals’ demographics. Our results show that some motivations related to social aspects and reputation increased in frequency and that some intrinsic and internalized motivations, such as learning and intellectual stimulation, are still highly relevant. We also found that contributing to OSS often transforms extrinsic motivations to intrinsic, and that while experienced contributors often shift toward altruism, novices often shift toward career, fun, kinship, and learning. OSS projects can leverage our results to revisit current strategies to attract and retain contributors, and researchers and tool builders can better support the design of new studies and tools to engage and support OSS development
Bibtex (copy):@INPROCEEDINGS{9402044,
author={Gerosa, Marco and Wiese, Igor and Trinkenreich, Bianca and Link, Georg and Robles, Gregorio and Treude, Christoph and Steinmacher, Igor and Sarma, Anita},
booktitle={2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)},
title={The Shifting Sands of Motivation: Revisiting What Drives Contributors in Open Source},
year={2021},
volume={},
number={},
pages={1046-1058},
doi={10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00098}}Annotation
By Casper Henkes, Ana Oprea, Krzysztof Baran. 🪧Slides.
The motivation behind individuals to contribute to Open-Source Software (OSS) has been largely overlooked in the past years. This paper embarks on the journey of (re)discovering the ambitions from which originate the drive of people to participate in OSS and how this type of motivation has changed throughout the years. The paper not only investigates the shift in motivation from different generations of contributors but it examines the shift in motivation in one individual over time. It is claimed that OSS contributors have higher intrinsic motivation, are more autonomous, and are more self-determined. Other studies, such as the one from Von Krogh et al., have researched this field to categorize the incipient studies of motivation in OSS. The authors analyzed different surveys from the past (2002-2003) and identified 12 main motivations for contributing to OSS, divided into Intrinsic, Internalised Extrinsic, and Extrinsic categories.
To get the data about OSS contributors’ opinions quantitatively, they used five-point Likert-scale (“strongly disagree ‘’ to “strongly agree”) questions to determine how contributors feel they are motivated. On top of that, they had open questions in order to gauge deeper into the participants’ reasoning. They also recorded demographic data like age, gender identity, country of origin and residence, whether they were paid or unpaid for their contributions, etcetera. To check if participation was valid, validation questions were made to see if the participants were paying attention. The survey was posted on social media with ads, and the authors’ network was utilized to spread the study.
As a result, the researchers ended up with 242 valid responses. They found out that intrinsic motivations like Fun, Altruism, and Kinship seemed to be major reasons for contributing to OSS, no matter the age, region, tenure of the contributor, and career stage. Additionally, they found that coursework at universities and programs that promote OSS like Google Summer of Code seemed to help the incentives to contribute. Interestingly, ideological (believing in free software philosophy) and own-use (a will to tweak the software for their own purposes) motivations have been on the decline.
While discussing their results, the researchers found some key observations and implications. The results are also in line with both the self-determination and the Socioemotional Selectivity theory. The first theory proposes a shift from extrinsic motivations to intrinsic ones while the other suggests that younger people tend to future-oriented goals while older people tend to present time goals. They also show that novices often shift their motivation towards career-oriented motivations, which may relate to the current landscape of OSS in which big companies play a significant role. These observations have implications. The paper states that OSS projects might invest in the community and society to retain older developers and extrinsic factors like google summer of code to attract novices. Following the two theories described above, more senior developers value the social aspects while the extrinsic motivation of the newcomers should shift towards intrinsic motivations.