ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes the literature on motivation of developers in open source projects (OSP) analysing the reasons put forward by three different disciplines economic, sociology and psychology to explain developer's involvement in such projects. Rentocchini and Tartari survey OSS adoption by the public sector in the Emilia-Romagna region. Emilia-Romagna is an Italian region that has recently been characterized by strong commitments towards e-government investments and is among a few regions in Europe to be provided with a public administration broadband infrastructure connecting the whole territory. Robey and Wang presents a cross-level theoretical model to analyse the role of community-level social capital in individual-level contributions to OSS projects. Crowston and Howison analyses the success of open source software by focusing on project success of one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research.
