Research On Knowledge Contribution Behavior Of Open Source Software (OSS) Community Users

Recently,the rapid development of Internet has promoted the prosperity of the software industry.Open source software(OSS),an important complement of commercial software,has also been widely used by enterprises.Apple and Microsoft,who prefer commercial software,have also embraced the concept of open source software and have been actively adopting it.Open source software community,as open source software hosting platform,is growing rapidly and its development has also received great attention from the government.As the core content of the open source software community,open source code is created by community users.How to motivate users to contribute open source code in the community is a difficult problem.Therefore,the main topic of this research is how to promote users to contribute high-quality open source code in the open source software community so as to promote the sound development of open source software and open source software community.This paper adopts the literature research method,interview research method and empirical research method to construct the research framework.so as to construct the research framework of this study.Then we research literatures at home and abroad and summarized the literatures from five aspects: open source software,open source software community,user behavior in virtual community,social influence theory and social cognition theory.According to the existing literatures' research and the characteristics of open source software community,we combine social cognition theory and social influence theory as the theoretical basis of this article.Then we construct a research model and research hypothesis of the research,and design the scale and questionnaire of this study according to the measurement of nine factors: subjective norms,social confirm,group norms,self-efficacy,information quality,system quality,social interaction ties,contribution intention and contribution behavior.This paper collects 302 valid questionnaire data,and uses SPSS19.0 to analysis reliability and validity of sample data.The result shows that both reliability and validity are good.Then,we use LISREL to test the established model and hypothesis.We find that: social confirm,self-efficacy,knowledge quality and system quality have a positive effect on the knowledge contribution intention of OSS community users.Among them,social confirm is the main influencing factor and self-efficacy is the second.The influence of subjective norms and group norms on knowledge contribution intention of OSS community users is not significant.This may be caused by the inconsistency between user's own goals and development goals of OSS community.Social interaction ties have a negative impact on knowledge contribution intention of OSS.This may be related to the community atmosphere of OSS community at this stage.This study reminds OSS community operators should pay attention to the construction of OSS community strategic goals,emphasis on the growth of OSS community itself,constantly improve the quality of open source code in the community,regularly upgrade the platform system,and actively create a friendly atmosphere for knowledge exchange,so as to improve OSS community users' knowledge contribution willingness and knowledge contribution behavior.