Why Do Developers Adopt Open Source Software? Past, Present and Future

Free/Libre Open Source Software has evolved dramatically in the last twenty years and many open source products are now considered similar, or even better than proprietary counterparts. Given the evolution of software – both concerning its development and its usage – it is likely that the motivations for adopting an open source rather than a proprietary product have changed over time. The goal of this work is to identify the current motivations for adopting open source software, and compare them with the motivations that held in the past. We conducted a set of interviews among software practitioners, asking them to rank motivations for the adoption of open source software, and we compared these new results with the motivations elicited in previous surveys published in 2010 and 2013. The results show that motivations have actually changed over time.