This last week's readings focused on the economic incentives towards using open source. The article called Economic Perspectives on Open Source written by Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole discusses some of economic motivations behind using Open Source. The article suggests that developers work on open source for both current benefits (pay) and delayed benefits (such as future job prospects) as well as an ego gratification that open source is cool!
I wouldn't be surprised if the latter is the reason why people start working on these projects in the first place. An example of this is Blake Ross, who was dissatisfied with the state of web browsers. He returned after a summer with the prototype of Mozilla Firefox. His effort gave him both "coolness" in the online community, but was able to be employed in any information technology position of his choosing. This is more dramatic than most contributors to open source, but it does prove that there can be indirect economic incentives to working on open source.
Kristian Bredemeyer
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