Does the open-source movement have much to offer the area of management theory?
I’ve been asked this question a number of times. Economists are shocked at the notion that people engage in behavior in many parts of their lives for nonmonetary reasons. And then, I’m always a little bit surprised at the degree to which, you know, people say, “Wow, look, these people are working for the open-source community.” There’s not a clear connection in a direct fashion from the code they write to their salaries. In some cases there is, of course. If you work for IBM Corp. and you write code for Apache, you get credit for writing that code. But lots of people put in significant amounts of their own time, because they have a little software problem they want to solve at home or at work, or at the end of the day they’re interested in trying to work on developing an algorithm, or something like that. It’s an interesting reminder that human motivation is a really complex thing. Monetary rewards are one piece of that. Very few people I know hate monetary rewards. But there are a lot
