Vortragsdetails

Crowding effects: How money influences open source projects and its contributors

von Matthias Stürmer (/ch/open)

Freitag, 01.06.2007, Forum Messehalle, 10:00-11:00 Uhr

Company involvement in open source projects is rising and more financial assets are entering the realm of open source development. As scientific research has shown, monetary incentives may negatively influence the motivation of volunteers. To what extent is this so called crowding-out effect present in today's open source projects? And when do extrinsic benefits improve overall development activity and support the progress of the project? Next to the theoretical background from previous research, this presentation will look at incentive systems such as Google Summer of Code, Debian's Dunc-Tank intiative and other corporate and community driven Bounty programs. The goal is to figure out the common properties of these experiments and evaluate their overall positive or negative influence for their initiators and the open source projects.

Über den Autor Matthias Stürmer:

Matthias Stuermer studied business administration and computer science at the university of Bern and graduated writing his thesis "Open Source Community Building". Since 2006 he works as doctoral student at ETH Zuerich at the chair of strategic management and innovation. His research focus is on open source software, free revealing strategies of firms and corporate R&D community building. So far, he has co-authored papers on software reuse in Debian and on the development process of the Nokia Internet Tablet. In his spare time, he initiated the first national open source conference and exhibition called LOTS in 2004 and continues to organize open source events such as the OpenExpo, today as a board member of the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open.