The real free-rider problems in open-source software are more a function of friction costs in submitting patches than anything else. A potential contributor with little stake in the cultural reputation game (see Chapter 3) may, in the absence of money compensation, think “It’s not worth submitting this fix because I’ll have to clean up the patch, write a ChangeLog entry, and sign the FSF assignment papers...”. It’s for this reason that the number of contributors (and, at second order, the success of) projects is strongly and inversely correlated with the number of hoops each project makes a
...more
