Abstract
Open source communities have been of great interest for
researchers recently, yet little can be agreed upon when it comes
to developers motives. While it has been shown that participants are
mostly driven to contribute based on work related needs, it has also been
shown that they contribute to fulfill an ideological purpose. We believe
that the majority of participants contribute to satisfy their own personal
goals. We reveal how developers function as a collective intelligence by
modeling the open source community as a disjoint group of contributors.
We show that most developers contribute to only one project and only
to a small portion of its source code. We demonstrated that useful
functionality of most OSS software is an emergent phenomenon created
by a collection of developers with different motivations and personal
goals.