Why do people participate in open source communities? What do they get out of it? Are they focused on their own needs, or are they mostly thinking about others?
Given that people are involved, the answer—as you might guess—is complicated and varied.
One need only consider the behaviors we see in open source communities to very quickly intuit that there’s no single force at work here. After all, we see plenty of contributors on most big open source projects who are doing so at part of their day job. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about open source beyond a paycheck. But it does suggest different reasons for participation than the contributor working nights and weekends on their own passion project. Furthermore, we see contributors who are focused on solving some interesting technical problems while others are explicitly trying to bring about a societal benefit.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out some common patterns. Not only has there been academic research into open source contributions specifically, but there’s a whole body of psychology literature dealing with motivation. As a result, motivation is the lens we’ll use in this chapter to examine the question of why contributors participate in open source.
We could say that this type of motivator is about "Show me the money!" and leave it at that. Extrinsic motivation isn’t quite that simple, but payment—in whatever form common during a given era and place—has historically been the go-to way to get people to do something. Whether to accumulate riches or provide themselves with basic necessities such as food and shelter. The idea that you do work you otherwise wouldn’t bother with in exchange for something of value is deep-rooted in most human societies.
However obvious the existence of extrinsic motivation may seem to the average person, it wasn’t really a field of formal study until the 1940s when behaviorist Clark Hull, later working with Kenneth Spence, came up with the idea of drive reduction theory. This theory focused on reducing primary drives like hunger and thirst. If you’re hungry you eat. If you’re thirsty you drink. Drive reduction theory fell out of fashion, in part because it didn’t focus on things—like money—that could be used to reduce drives but only in a secondary way. However, we see echoes of drive reduction theory in familiar concepts like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Coming back to what makes contributors work on open source, money can, of course, be a big incentive. Even going back twenty years or so, many major open source projects had a significant number of contributors who were paid by their companies to work on open source.
Career advancement goes hand in hand with pay. But is open source software any different from proprietary software development in this regard? It may be. Multiple researchers have found empirical evidence to support the idea there’s at least a perceived advantage that supports the argument there are career advantages to developing code that’s in the open and therefore available for others to look at and work with. Indeed, the idea of "GitHub-as-resume" has become a common (if sometimes inappropriately applied) theme.
Research beginning in the 1970s started to focus on intrinsic motivations, which do not require an apparent reward other than the activity itself. Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, would later evolve from studies comparing intrinsic and extrinsic motives, and from a growing understanding of the dominant role intrinsic motivations can play in behavior.
With respect to open source software, it’s perhaps the ideological or altruistic motivations that first come to mind here. After all, in the case of free software at least, there was always an ideological and political element from the beginning even if there were also practical benefits for a user to have access to source code.
There’s some evidence from surveys that contributors can be somewhat motivated by these factors. However, the research results are mixed. Some contributors say on surveys that they’re participating, in part, for ideological or altruistic reasons. But the effect is most pronounced among contributors doing open source as a hobby. And while altruism certainly can influence professional contributors, this mostly seems to be the case among contributors who are also satisfied with their pay and other aspects of their career.
A variant of altruism is kinship amity. It’s related to the concept of gift economies but is specific to family (kin) groups which don’t expect a calculated quid pro quo. (In other words, family members do things for each other but they don’t typically keep a running tally, at least a systematic one, of who hasn’t been pulling their weight recently.) It’s different from altruism in that it is restricted to the group to which one belongs, such as an open source community. Here again the research is mixed. Studies have generally found a positive relationship between identified kinship amity and various measurements of effort, such as number of hours worked per week—but the correlation is often fairly weak.
Finally, there’s just fun. This should come as no surprise to anyone who hangs around open source developers, designers, and content creators. Most of them like working on open source projects. One large study from 2007 (Luthiger and Jungwirth) determined that fun accounted for 28 percent of the effort (hours) dedicated to projects. Though, again, it’s easier to feel motivated by fun and altruism when it’s either a hobby or you’re otherwise satisfied professionally.
Today’s psychology literature also includes the idea of internalized extrinsic motivations. These are extrinsic motivations such as gaining skills to enhance career opportunities—but they’ve been internalized so that the motivation comes from within rather than coming as a direct result of a carrot (reward) being dangled by someone else. It’s the difference between learning a new language because you know keeping current on new tech pays off over time versus receiving a salary increase as a direct payoff for earning a certification. Gaining a good peer reputation, among community insiders and potential employers, for work in open source is one good example of how this type of motivation can play out in open source development. A variety of surveys have supported the idea that peer reputation is a driver for participation.
Learning is also frequently mentioned as a big benefit to participating in open source projects. Learning may be intrinsically satisfying but it can also be an important ingredient of career advancement. It can be hard to tease apart the intrinsic from the extrinsic here though. Is it learning for learning’s sake? Is it learning for specific skills needed on the job?
A final motivator in this category is what researchers call "own-use value" but is more recognizably described as something like "scratch your own itch." Develop something that you want for yourself and create something for others in the process. That something is ultimately an external reward to yourself but no one is forcing you to do it.
As noted earlier, motivations for many things are multi-faceted and contributing to open source software is no exception. However, here are three takeaways that you may find useful.
Don’t expect non-extrinsic motivators to carry too much of the load. Many do contribute to open source projects for idealistic or altruistic reasons. But those are usually not the sole motivators and may not even be important ones. Especially in the case of projects that have commercial backing, pay, and other professional working benefits matter a great deal.
Ampily non-extrinsic motivators such as learning and peer recognition. While not replacements for more direct benefits, the opportunity to be recognized by peers and to work in new technology areas are motivators. Organizations should consider peer recognition programs and explicitly encourage learning in order to make the best use of these motivational factors.
Motivators can be counter-productive when over-rotated. Precisely because motivations are multi-faceted, don’t place too big a bet on any single one. We already discussed the limitations of ideology and altruism. However, also consider something like "scratch your own itch" for example. If that’s the only reason someone contributes, they’ll tend to wander in and out of a project as their own specific needs merit. That may be a perfectly fine outcome, but it’s not a path to developing a long-term maintainer.