Motivations of Individuals and Firms Participating in Open Source Community

Open source software attracts more and more attentions in the world, motivation of individuals and firms participating such activities also raises interest. This study proposes the motivation framework, including individuals and firms, their intrinsic and extrinsic motives from economic, social and technological view tries to deep understand this phenomenon. This study summarizes that intrinsic motivations is the leading role of individual programmers in determining the participation of open source community, while extrinsic motivations are more important to firms, but their motivations overlapped somewhere.