Bonaccorsi, Andrea and Rossi, Cristina, Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? First Monday Volume 9, Number 1 � January 5th 2004.

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_1/bonaccorsi/index.html

During 2002, we conducted a survey on 146 Italian firms supplying Open Source software. This paper compares our data on firms� motivations with data emerging from surveys made on individual programmers. We analyse the role played by different classes of motivations (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement of different groups of agents in Open Source activities.

Open Source is simply too powerful an idea and too useful a tool to overlook. Understanding what makes it work can help to find a middle ground that balances the needs of users with the rewards that developers deserve.