Motivational factors in software development: A study to explore the relationship between work locus of control and contribution to open source projects.

摘要

The open source community has been identified as a phenomenon in current research due to the unique nature of participation. This research project will explore the relationship between open source contribution and work locus of control by a quantitative survey in a quasi-experimental design with a non-equivalent group design on a world-wide software developer population. Current open source research explores how to motivate a developer; however, the core psychology of why a developer is motivated to participate in this community has not been explored. Work locus of control is an instrument to explore a dimension of core self-evaluation by exploring if "internals" or "externals" are naturally drawn to the open source community. A distinct trend in the community involvement has shown that open source contributors participate in open source projects for reasons that do not fit inside established business philosophies, thus creating a new innovation for organization theory in business practices. This unusual trend has become the essential cornerstone for the success of the open source movement; without community support, an open source project simply dies and does not grow beyond its current state. The results of the data analysis showed there was no significance in locus of control between those software developers identifying themselves as open source contributors and those identifying as proprietary developers.