| The purpose of this study was to investigate the motivations of individuals that are willing to join open source communities and voluntarily dedicate their effort and expertise for OSS development. Despite the emergence of various studies on developers' motivation, there is little research that focuses on developers' intentions to continue their participation and expend their effort. Expectancy-valence theory, human resource theory, and volunteerism were adapted to form two research models: a theoretical model of OSS developers' continuation, and an exploratory model of developers' effort.The continuation model captures those factors that might significantly influence OSS developers' satisfaction with OSS development, their commitment and intentions to continue participating in future open source projects, and the causal relationships among these factors. The effort model is developed to measure the associations between developers' effort and motivation, schedule availability, and expertise.The findings regarding the motivation of developers showed that volunteering can reflect multiple motivations: intrinsic motivation (i.e., helping) and extrinsic motivation (i.e., career advancement). A positive and satisfactory experience leads to a positive attitude toward retention. Moreover, volunteer developers' commitment primarily depends on motivation to help. These results, taken as a whole, suggest that OSS developers are motivated both by the altruism of helping and the economic incentive for career advancement.Developers' effort was primarily influenced by both their motivation to help and peer recognition, which implies that the impact of intrinsic motivators on effort is stronger than that of extrinsic motivators. Enjoyment demonstrated a significantly negative effect on effort, suggesting that developers with high levels of motivation on enjoyment did not spend more time on open source projects than those with less motivation on enjoyment.This study also provided empirical evidence that volunteers may vary their motivation according to their actual experience and the commercial viability of their project. The length of experience suggests a life cycle effect on motivation i.e., the longer developers stay, the higher levels of motivation grow. In addition, the more commercially viable an open source project is, the more likely developers are motivated. Finally, scheduling availability is an important factor of predicting continuation and effort. |
