MOTIVATION TO USE F/LOSS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES


Most people of developed countries used to be F/LOSS professional (Subramanyam and Xia, 2008) and these people were mostly hackers who helped improved the system/application using the internet (Williams, 2002). Recently though practitioners and government from developing countries have emerged and are supporting F/LOSS (Hahn, 2002; Mingzhi and Jie, 2004; Tong, 2004; Li et al., 2005). In developing countries, F/LOSS can assist in closing the digital divide (Stallman, 2003). Because of the software industry growth, government of developing countries are showing interest and making policies related to F/LOSS. With rise of Information and communication technologies (ICT), most of the students are choosing computers to be their profession in developing countries and the numbers of developers from developing countries are growing more rapidly in recent years. In their study, Subramanyam and Xia (2008) have found evidence of motivation being crucial in these parts of the world.

The motivations may be Intrinsic, Extrinsic or Internalized extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from inside an individual or exists within individuals. This kind of motivation is important because it results in high-quality learning and creativity (Ryan and Deci, 2000). This motivation is unique to F/LOSS because sharing and learning is a part of F/LOSS. During the development of F/LOSS application, developers from around the globe share their knowledge with one another mostly providing the inexperienced developer to learn from the experienced developer. People also share their knowledge within the community to get recognition and earn respect within the community (Subramanyam and Xia, 2008). F/LOSS developers demonstrate their skills through their work, and this can earn them a carrier opportunity. Companies observe the skills of developers in the community and if they want such developers in their team, they offer the developers with job which pay high income and provides with other benefits (Lerner and Tirole, 2002).

Extrinsic motivation is the kind which satisfies the needs of individual indirectly by obtaining financial or non financial rewards (Lam and Lambermont-Ford, 2010). While working on F/LOSS application, direct financial reward is not likely to be offered to the developers but they may be awarded with indirect financial rewards. Government of most countries like Singapore (Hahn, 2002), Germany (Hahn, 2002), Brazil (Hahn, 2002; Kingstone, 2005), India (Marson, 2005), China (Mingzhi and Jie, 2004; Li et al., 2005) etc have been supporting F/LOSS for some years now. In some countries, government has also offered tax reduction to the companies using F/LOSS (Wong, 2004) while in Brazil, government has enforced F/LOSS for federal departments (Kingstone, 2005). Raman who is a researcher at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India has said F/LOSS to be relatively inexpensive and easily modified to unique needs (Marson, 2005). So the demand for F/LOSS developers has emerged in these countries and companies have been giving preference and hiring developers with the knowledge and experience with F/LOSS (Subramanyam and Xia, 2008).

The other motivation is Internalized extrinsic motivation. Internalized extrinsic motivation generates when users wants their needs to be fulfilled. Some of the end users of F/LOSS are mostly people who need that particular software. So these end users are involved in the development of the software (Subramanyam and Xia, 2008). In 1960s’ the source code used to come along with the software. Commercial computer manufactures shared the source code with the programmers so that they could help these companies to indentify the bug and improve the software. The community of true hackers used their own time to play around with the codes, exchange ideas about the code and help improve the software (Williams, 2002; Li et al., 2005). These developers have strong motivation for innovations. They also take part in fixing bugs and modifying the available source code to meet their unique needs (Subramanyam and Xia, 2008).

REFERENCES
http://pravab.blogspot.com/2011/09/references.html


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