Assignment 4 CITP

Introduction

In recent years there has been a growing interest in open source software and open

source content development initiatives

The technology software has become a major concern of computer ethics recently. With the development of communication devices and the improved telecommunication infrastructure, the Internet emerged and has been using around the world. Therefore, the distribution of software and cooperation on the Internet are technically getting easier and faster. Open source software development in the Internet opens a new possibility for software developers which allow them to practice programming over long distances. Since software is considered as a result of intellectual labor, this new technology supports intellectual property by providing more powerful and more efficient ways to create and disseminate computer softwares. Thus, new challenges to understanding of intellectual property have been brough with the development of Open Source Software. That is distribution of software with source code which is made available for others to study and improve (Coar 2006 Source Code Definition).

OSS movement caused by a cultural attitude of oppsition to the restrictive rights under intellectual property laws in US academic. Then it was particularly opposing to firms in using the operating system UNIX developed at Bell Laboratories as commercial purposes. In 1985, Richard Stallman established the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the development of Free Software. However, some parts of the FSF community considerd the limitation of ifselt; therefore, Open Source Initiative lead by Bruce Peren and Eric Raymond was established to promote OSS on a realistic view in 1998 (Henley and Kemp 2008 p78)

Recently, many big firms such as IBM and Sun Microsystem are strongly supporting OSS movement. For example, IBM established a Linux Technology Centre to work on developing OSS which now employs more than 600 Linux kernel developers (Charlson, 2007). Also, in 2005 Sun open sourced its operating system with the OpenSolaris project and it continues to employ hundreds of software engineers to work on OpenSolaris (OpenSolaris FAQ). Besides, a considerable number of software developers are giving freely their contribution to OSS. SourceForge.net, a repository of open source projects, lists more than 178,467 projects and more than 1 millions registered users (SourceForge). Consequently, this phenomenon gives much attention to researchers in the field.

Open source software is making a large impact on many aspects of society in the ethics in computer professionals. Since producing software is a business in which computer engineers

develop the software for the profit of the company; yet Open Source Software appears to be not. Accordingly, the question of individual‘s motivation to contribute their works in OSS community has been extensively researched. Potential explanations are the motivation to build up ones’s reputation by gainning recognition for their ability was associated with enhancing one’s career prospect (Hars and Ou 2002, Lakhani and Wolf 2005); the motivation to learn and enhance their skills (Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003,Ye and Kishida 2003). Lastly, altruism has been argued as one of the primary intrinsic incentives for OSS developers (Wu et al. 2007). However, ... It is obvious that the values ones might get out from OSS in realation to the various private benefits compesate the OSS developers for their private cost of programmings. More importantly, there are different levels of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations relevant; therefore, it is vital to understand and to evaluate these motivations.

Altruism

Altruism has been argued as the primary intrinsic motivation for OSS developers. ‘‘Altruism . . . is a natural part of human nature [and] . . . is exhibited in some manner by everyone’’ (Ozinga 1999 cited in Wu et al. 2007 p. 234). The context discussed about the altruism in the OSS community is the helping behavior of knowledgeable people who want to share what they know with the community.

Pure altruism and reciprocal altruism must also be mentioned as important motives for publishing the source code of one’s software. With its promotion of computer users’ right to use and redistribute to some extent computer programs, OSS is regareded as a social movement based on fundamental democratic principles (Richard Stallman 1999 cited in Britzer et al. 2007 p164). Apprently, OSS developers would like to help others, and also at the same time give something back to those who assisted them. Another branch of altruism of OSS developers can be seen as reciprocal altruism (Wu et al. 2007 p254). In other words, OSS paticipants who contribute freely their work into a projects have a belief that other programmers investing efforts in related problems will also make the resulting solution publicly available.

However, altruism is to some extent a motivation of OSS developers. Hars and Ou’s empirical study (2002 p6 ) suggests different levels of altruism as a motivator, showing that only 16.5% of the respondents ranked altruism as high (6 out of 7) or very high (7 out of 7), whereas peer-recognition and human capital enhancement are ranked with 43% and 88% of respondents respectively. Additionally, Lakhani and Hippel (2003 p931) observe that in providing answers to questions asked in the Apache system, there is about 2% of the knowledge providers are responsible for about 50% of the answers to questions posted on the help system and 50% of the questions are provided by 24% of the knowledge providers .This means that only few individuals are engaging in helping others. The findings from these empirical research lead to understand that software contributors are more focused on what they may gain from others in the community and may also have in mind the implications of their contribution on their career prospects (Lerner and Tirole, 2002 cited in Lakhani and Wolf 2005 p6).

Self-development

The second motivation of OSS developers is self-development through learning from others in the field, and enhancing their abilities and skills. Ye and Kishida (2003 p1) argue that the intrinsic satisfaction for developer obtained by learning in OSS community is one of the driving forces that motivate developers to get involved in OSS projects. One reason behind this is easy accessibility of source code when it becomes open for every software developers, containing the knowledge and creativity in there. It then is providing the learning resource that attracts developers to participate in the OSS community. Thus developers are able to learn from the system, from each other.

Futhermore, developers may be motivated by learning through exploring or doing new OSS project (Ye and Kishida 2003 p7). In the first form of learning, learners attempt to overcome an existing problem. For example, LarryWall created Perl a tool to automatically generate webpages because he ran into a problem he could not solve with existing tools. In learning by doing new OSS projects, developers have the oppurtunities to apply their existing knowledge by undertake practical tasks of a project, thus deepening their understanding of a certain field and improving their programming skills.

Participants also improve their programming skill through the active peer review that is prevalent in OSS projects (Raymond 1990; Wayner 2000 cited in Lakhani and Wolf 2005, p7) Improvement programming skills, an extrinsic motivation related to human capital improvement, was a close second, with 41.8% participants saying it was an important motivator (Lakhani and Wolf 2005, p 12). Linus Torvards started Linux partially because he wanted to learn more about the architecture of Intel 386, so he develops an operating system for it.

In addition, most developers who start an OSS project are obviously master programmers; therefore, their systems could be the examples of excellent programming practice. The skill and knowledge embedded in those systems are legitimately offered to developers since they are freely distributed. It is just similar to the way that ones learn to write by reading literature, thus reading existing source code of expert programmer is a powerful way to master the programming practice.

Despite self-development plays importatnt role underlying motivations of OSS developers, this is still insufficient for explaining why OSS developers contributing their work freely and making the programming publicly available and for free. Accordingly, there must be other factors explaining the OSS phenomenon.

Gaining Reputation

One of the main motivations of OSS developers is gaining reputation within the OSS community. This motivation involves developers’s desire to establish their reputation and to gain recoginized for their ability. A number of researchers have argued that gaining a reputation within a OSS community is an important incentive for developers (Lerner and Tirole, 2002; cited in Bitzer et al. 2007 p.161). Furthermore, building up reputation through OSS appears to be an instrument in enhancing developers’s career prospect since they might have the oppurtunities to demonstrate their capability and skillfulness in programming

OSS developers establish their reputation by obtaining recognition from their peers. Raymond (1999, p 384), a very experienced participant in open source projects, describes in his paper that open source software development style allow its programmers to receive constructive feedback about the quality of their contribution. Through the process of receiving opinions from users on their

products the developers are able to notice that how their works are appreciated. This might encourage the authors spending additional effort to improve their code.

Similarly, Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) present results from case studies at Apache, the most popular web sever software on the Internet. As Apache is a relatively complex software program, a field support system is created to assist user having difficulties with the program. Books, online journal, and an online collection of answers to frequenly asked questions are sources of technical help for Apache users in addtion to Usenet help forum. The possibility of gaining reputation and related benefits through helping users is considerable because the identity of providers can be preserved through their e-mail addresses or user names to the answers they post( Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003 p.937 ).

Since the reputation of OSS developers has been built strongly within the community, this will become an effective way to advertise one’s skillfulness and capabilities. Hars and Ou (2002, p4)

argue that the achievement in open source project can provide participants a higher marketability than others to the commercial software employers in the competence of IT industry. This argument of self-marketing appears to be fitted to the most managers’s recuitment of software developers. With the wide range in programming skills, it is obvious that vendors will recognize

the value of the individuals who have a record of producing succesful software. This suggests that the IT firms’ role, along with the presence of paid participants, is increasingly important by providing resources for the OSS communities (Lakhani and Wolf, 2005 p17).

These evidences indicate that the perception that participation enhances one's professional reputation is a significant predictor of individual motivation. They are also consistent with prior research, providing additional evidence that building reputation is a strong motivator for OSS developers. These researches also provide weak evidence that OSS developers who enjoy helping others provide more helpful advice. One potential explanation for the weak influence of intrinsic motivations may be due the monetary rewards having influence on OSS developers.