Job-Market signaling is ranked high among the explanations why individuals engage voluntarily in OSS projects. If true, signaling implies the existence of a wage premium for OSS engagement. However, due to a lack of data this issue has not been tested previously. Based on a novel data set...

This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a...