What motivates developers in OSSP?

Understanding what motivates developers to join and contribute to OSSP has received much popular and academic attention in recent years but still remains a puzzling phenomenon. Researchers investigating the subject have relied on different theoretical lenses (i.e., economics, sociology, psychology, information systems), to theorize about and explain the reasons that induce participants to join and contribute to such projects. Early studies and theorizations have largely argued that developers engage in the creation of useful and socially valuable software mainly for social and altruistic reasons (Raymond, 1999). Since then, various approaches to examining OSS developers’ motives have emerged. Each of them provides several reasons for developers’ participation to OSSP (e.g., Hars and Ou, 2002; Ghosh et al., 2002; Lakhani and Wolf, 2005; Shah, 2006; Benbya and Belbaly, 2010). While, our knowledge of developers’ motives in OSSP is growing, understanding how developers behave in OSSP and why they behave that way, remains an open question.