Comparing motivations of individual programmers and firms to take part in the open source movement: From community to business

The first urgent question for any scholar willing to study the Open Source (OS) movement has been clearly put by Glass (1999, 104): I don’t know who these crazy people are who want to write, read and even revise all that code without being paid anything for it at all. A growing body of economic literature has been addressing the motivations at the basis of the participation in the OS movement since when the new paradigm has become successful and triggered the entrance on the market of firms offering Open Source based products and services (Open Source firms). However, most of the empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect companies that adopt Open Source business models. This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of the firms that engage in OS activities. Findings on firms’ motivations are compared His recent research interests are in the economics of science, industrial dynamics in high technology industries, and theory and empirics of diffusion of technologies with network externality. He has authored or edited five books and written 80 papers in international journals and conferences. His studies have been published in several top refereed journals. He is member elected of the Executive Committee of the PRIME (Policies for Research and Innovation in the Move towards the European Research Area) Network of Excellence (6^th Framework Programme) and has previously coordinated or contributed actively to several EU research projects (within TACIS-ACE, DG III, DG XII and DG XXII). She got her Ph.D. in economics and management of innovation at Sant’ Anna School in November 2003. At present, she collaborates also with the Department of Electrical Systems and Automation of the University of Pisa. Her research interests deal with the economics of open source software (OSS) and focus on profit-oriented firms that offer open source-based products and services (open source firms). Under a theoretical point of view, she is now investigating the motivations that lead individuals to provide a continuous stream of contributions to collective goods that are immaterial in their nature (e.g., participation in OSS projects, participation in the scientific community). with the results of the surveys on individual programmers aiming at analyzing the role played by different classes of incentives (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement in the movement of different typologies of agents (Individual vs. organizations).