  Open source development, to a great extent, is a type of social movement in
which shared ideologies play critical roles. For participants of open source
development, ideology determines how they make sense of things, shapes their
thoughts, actions, and interactions, enables rich social dynamics in their
projects and communities, and hereby realizes profound impacts at both
individual and organizational levels. While software engineering researchers
have been increasingly recognizing ideology's importance in open source
development, the notion of "ideology" has shown significant ambiguity and
vagueness, and resulted in theoretical and empirical confusion. In this
article, we first examine the historical development of ideology's
conceptualization, and its theories in multiple disciplines. Then, we review
the extant software engineering literature related to ideology. We further
argue the imperatives of developing an empirical theory of ideology in open
source development, and propose a research agenda for developing such a theory.
How such a theory could be applied is also discussed.
