Determinants of the choice of open source software license
Citation: Ravi Sen, Chandrasekar Subramaniam, Matthew L. Nelson (2008) Determinants of the choice of open source software license. Journal of Management Information Systems (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.2753/MIS0742-1222250306
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.2753/MIS0742-1222250306
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.2753/MIS0742-1222250306
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Determinants of the choice of open source software license
Wikidata (metadata): Q64226472
Tagged: Business
(RSS) FLOSS (RSS), law (RSS)
Summary
Ravi Sen, Chandrasekar Subramaniam, and Matthew L. Nelson's paper aims to explain why FLOSS developers choose certain types of licenses over others. The projects divides licenses into three groups:
- Strong Copyleft (e.g., GPL) which makes more than half the sample
- Weak Copyleft (e.g., LGPL)
- Non-Copyleft (e.g., BSD or MIT license)
The paper tries to look at the how motivations and attitudes influence the choice of one class of license over another. It builds heavily on the research on motivation which includes intrinsic motivation including creative pleasure and the joy of challenges, extrinsic motivation including status and economic opportunity, and developer attitudes about user rights, OSS redistribution, and social obligation. The authors propose a model in which each of these affect license preference.
The hypotheses (quoted verbatim) include:
- Hypothesis 1a: The developers who perceive greater creative pleasure from participating in OSS projects will prefer less restrictive OSS licenses. (Not Supported)
- Hypothesis 1b: The developers who perceive greater challenge from participating in OSS projects will prefer more restrictive OSS licenses. (Partially Supported)'
- Hypothesis 2a: The developers who perceive greater status opportunities by participating in OSS projects will prefer less restrictive OSS licenses. (Partially Supported)'
- Hypothesis 2b: The developers who perceive greater economic opportunities by participating in OSS projects will prefer less restrictive OSS licenses. (Not Supported)
- Hypothesis 3a: The developers who favor greater end-user rights will prefer less restrictive OSS licenses. (Not Supported)
- Hypothesis 3b: The developers who favor greater software redistribution rights will prefer less restrictive OSS licenses. (Supported)
- Hypothesis 3c: The developers who view OSS participation as social obligation will prefer more restrictive OSS licenses. (Supported)
The hypotheses are tested with data from SourceForge. The authors administered 2,000 emails to SourceForge project administrators and received a little under a 10% response rate in terms of usable responses. The results show a strong degree of intrinsic motivation (more than twice that of extrinsic factors) and do show some slight support for the hypotheses.
The authors suggest that FLOSS project managers can help choose licenses wit the goal of getting certain types of people to interact and can choose "the right type of OSS license that will attract the developers with the characteristics that the managers desire for their projects." The authors do not explore the possibility that different authors might choose different licenses because they are parts of a communities where a particular license might be seen as more salient and where which attracts certain types of participants.
