# kaal:claim:3808859-018

**Claim.** Open source contribution is governed by a cost-benefit calculation rather than pure altruism: the volunteer's opportunity costs of forgone paid work must be offset by satisfaction, autonomy, peer recognition, skill acquisition, or downstream commercial opportunity.

**Type.** mechanism  **Support.** argued

**Source quote.**

> Software developers perform a cost-benefit analysis when they decide to make an open source project contribution and throughout the respective project.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *Decentralization – Why We Need Technology Infrastructure Upgrades* (2021), IV.3 Contributors’ Incentives, page 31

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, Decentralization – Why We Need Technology Infrastructure Upgrades (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3808859

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `304ad25d43b5ecea3158e3a2ca04e6e1e3bd2958e2134e2dcefbfedf3b6f3ab7` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202021%20-%20Decentralization%20%E2%80%93%20Why%20We%20Need%20Technology%20Infrastructure%20Upgrades.pdf

**Topics.** open-source-and-code, risk-and-incentives

**Keywords.** open-source, incentives, opportunity-cost, volunteer-labor

**Related claims.**

- supersedes: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3406323-010

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.