Via the always carefully inoffensive ValleyWag, Psychology Today has a post about a study of the motivations of open source programmers and other participants in collaborative online projects. The study finds that “software contributors placed a greater emphasis on reputation-gaining and self-development motivations, compared with content contributors, who placed a greater emphasis on altruistic motives.”
We’ve discussed here before how open source projects often represent a more efficient way of producing information goods than firms. Some are eager to class open source as “non-market” (read altruistic) behavior, but I think it’s better considered as market behavior that happens to trade in human capital, reputation, self-satisfaction, etc. rather than money.
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