Motivation and Incentivizing of OSS Developers
Gabler eBooks · 2009
Assuming the corporation has found employees that are willing to work on a corporate OSS project and, thereafter, successfully launched it, the company is now faced with two problems. First, the company needs to manage the newly-found “freedom” of its own employees who can now (potentially) perform work with outside experts that they find to be a lot of fun—and that unfortunately may have little to do with what the corporation initially expected. Second, if the company successfully managed to attract third-party developers to work on their project, how can the company get them to do work that is in its best interest? In order to be able to answer these questions, we need to understand how developers in OSS projects are motivated, how this motivation can generally be influenced, and how the latter can be done by the corporation.