Levelator was written by Bruce Sharpe and his son Malcom, and, like much Internet content, it is free. What motivated the Sharpes to spend the time to develop Levelator and why did they contribute it to the community? I don't know, but one clue is the fact that they are distributing it through the Gigavox network, which grew out of IT Conversations, a volunteer organization for podcasting IT-related conferences. IT Conversations editors and audio engineers were all volunteers, so it may have seemed natural for the Sharpe's to contribute their software.
My personal reaction to Levelator may also help with the "why" question. I spent about two hours testing Levelator and creating a teaching note -- an example of its use. I will use the note in teaching, and I also posted it on the Levelator Forum so others could use it. What did I gain from that effort?
The teaching note has no monetary value (the program surely does), but it is "capital" since I can use it on my job. Someone else using it would make me happy -- I would get a kick out of that at no additional cost. Creating the note was also fun. Even small creative acts are enjoyable, although there is usually some tedium in the execution. Reputation building provided another motivation -- in a small way, I am now a contributor to the community of Levelator users.
The bottom line is that the payoff was sufficient that I contributed two hours of my time. In return for creating and contributing the teaching note:
Some content contributions require no effort -- they are a by product of doing something you do for yourself. For example, when you create a Web page with a link in it, you are implicitly giving it a positive rating, and creating content to be used in Google searches. Similarly, when you create a del.icio.us bookmark for your own use, you are providing rating data to the del.icio.us users community.
Regardless of the motivation or cost, if any, of contributing, system designers will succeed if they work to increase the benefit to the contributor while lowering the cost of contributing.
These large and small contributions add up. How many millions of hours did Internet users contribute to the online community yesterday? What is the economic value of those millions of hours -- how does the Gross Contributed Product compare to the Gross National Product? What will it be in ten years?
Might this non-market economy one day rival the market economy in importance? (Stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers might ask the same thing). If so, what are the implications for organizations or management or the entertainment industry? (Writing a new teaching note is more fun than watching most TV programs).
This is reminiscent of the Wikipedia. Neither the government nor the market economy could create and maintain the Wikipedia, it could only be done for free -- a cool paradox.
For one rough estimate of the productivity of the open source software community, listen to this audio clip of Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. The size of the Linux-related hardware and software market is expected to reach $48 billion by 2011, roughly the 2007 GDP or the state of Maine.
If this sort of thing seems interesting, check out The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler or listen to his talk on IT Conversations or at UC Berkeley. Of course you can read about him and his ideas on Wikipedia too.