Why Do People Participate in Open Source? Reputation.

I stumbled upon this article written by Mitch Kappor from April of last year. Entitled How is Open Source Special, it gives a nice overview of open source software.

Years ago, Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, made a statement that is still true today - that no matter what your company is, most of the smart people in the world work somewhere else. Open source is a way of leveraging those untapped resources - those smart people.

To answer the skeptic's question, "Why do people participate?" Kappor points to reputation.

The work may take a lot of time, and he or she is not getting paid to contribute to the project, but, in fact, the person is building reputation capital, and reputation is a significant resource.

As a young person who has been online for a number of years, I can attest to this notion. Copyrightings represents a major foray into building my 'online identity.' Robert Scoble, I imagine, was hired at PodTech.net more for his blogging endeavors than his videographing skill (though he certainly does a good job).

The 'database of intentions' John Battelle speaks of is the sum of someones online actions. This post and subsequent searches on Google and my comments on TechCrunch and my additions to Wikipedia are part of my online identity in the same way a coders changes to Firefox or Linux are part of their identity.

This isn't new. Reputation is the new resume.