Motivation and Contributions in Open Source: Stop Romanticizing Unpaid Contributions

by Joe Brockmeier - Mar. 29, 2010Comments (5)

Pay!

Does motivation matter? Open source contributors are increasingly people who are paid to work on open source. GNOME contributor Lucas Rocha asks how this impacts communities over the long term.

This is not a new question by any stretch. People worried about the influence of commercial interests in open source in the early days before Red Hat was a public company and when Slackware was still considered a major Linux distribution. I suspect people will still be asking this question for years to come.

Rocha poses several questions, including "Does being hired to do F/OSS work actually destroy the intrinsic motivations of a previously volunteer contributor?"

I don't think that it does, necessarily. It's been observed that many contributors start working on open source in college, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that is a norm. Not true of everyone, of course, but a lot of people discover and start contributing to open source when they're in college. This also happens to be when people have a lot of free time and very few financial obligations.

What happens when these folks don't find paid work doing open source? Often the contributions fall off because life intervenes and there's just not time to balance having a life, a full-time job, and making a lot of contributions to a project. That doesn't mean they disappear entirely, but often it means much reduced contributions.

The flip side, people hired to work on FLOSS projects, seem to remain involved and engaged. My observation of people who've taken jobs working on projects is that they often remain just as motivated, not by the paycheck but by the project. The paycheck is just a tool to allow contributors to continue to focus on FLOSS instead of something else to pay the bills. I've seen contributors continue working on projects even after being laid off or taking new jobs, at least until those new projects or jobs consume their available cycles.

Rocha also says that he believes communities should be "mainly measured by the number of volunteer contributors it has because those are the people who are surely giving their contributions based on intrinsic motivations."

This seems to be a bit too simplistic a view, in my opinion. If you look at, say, the Linux kernel community, few would say that it's a weak or unhealthy community. Yet, many if not most of the contributors are paid to work on the kernel. Certainly most of the core contributors are. They're not contributing because they are paid to (at least most of the time), they're paid because companies see value in the contributions they're making and see a need to support that work. Also, because companies want to have some influence on what those folks work on or to be able to draw on their experience.

The Linux kernel community isn't the only one, of course. If you look at Apache, PostgreSQL, and most successful projects, you'll find most core contributors are making a living related to their contributions. This is as it should be. The romanticized notion that communities are only healthy if a lot of people are contributing for free is misguided. Yes, a healthy community may inspire unpaid contributions, but healthy communities also have stable core contributors who can dedicate a lot of time to the project. That's not a reasonable long-term plan for unpaid volunteers who aren't independently wealthy.

Photo courtesy of @ericskiff on Flickr under CC SA 2.0

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by an anonymous user on Mar. 29, 2010

I mostly agree with you. It needs to be a balance between paid and unpaid. The volunteers may come with new features, exciting ideas, and the paid ones may focus on the core and on maintaining , for example those new features brought by volunteers.

I think there are a lot of reasons to contribute, and I do not think anyone should say that your contribution is worse because of your reasons. You should look at the code and do not care whether a guy is trying to find a job... finding a job and working is not only something you need, it is a very honest thing to do.

What if someone, trying to find a job, sends an exciting contribution to an opensource project? What if a company maintains some of the code so others can work on new and exciting features? The point is to have contributors and to have a community. Most free software projects I know have people that is being paid behind, and the software is very good, and I've sent patches to them as part of my work so next time they release a version it may have that feature that I need or that bug I fixed. And why not, have my name on it so next time I look for a job, when they google my name it will appear. Why not? The important thing is that I've contributed, not why..

But yep, It is only my opinion :) .

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by Lucas Rocha on Mar. 29, 2010

Hey Zonker, thanks for commenting on the topic. You have some valid points. I just posted something in response those here:

http://www.lucasr.org/2010/03/30/some-extra-points-about-intrinsic-motiv...

Cheers!

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by Josh Berkus on Mar. 30, 2010

Zonker,

Heh. Not like you and I would have talked about this topic at all. ;-)

I hate hate hate it when news sources talk about contributing to open source as "altruism". It is not. Only crazy people are altruistic; everyone else works to benefit themselves. Sometimes that benefit is non-monetary or intangible; sometimes it is deferred gratification, but nobody does stuff for no benefit. I sometimes think that the people who talk a lot about altruism are doing it because they want to discourage people from careers in OSS.

For my part: I make a good living working on PostgreSQL, a lot more than I expected to make when I graduated college into the recession of the early 90's. More importantly, I have a lot of independence and I get to do interesting, mentally stimulating work. Yes, I've bounced around several companies, unemployment, and consulting, but who in Silicon Valley hasn't?

BTW, I'm not saying that Lucas is talking about altruism, which he isn't. I'm talking about other people in the more mainstream press.

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by El Spamolito on Mar. 30, 2010

Good points, all. One other bit of perspective: The higher up the application stack an OSS project lives (i.e., the more vertical/narrow a solution), the more likely a person's contributions will be tied to his/her job.

There are lots of reasons people might hack on the Linux kernel that have nothing to do with a business. Fewer, perhaps, when you're working on the PostgreSQL query planner - but there's still academia and the world of research, perhaps.

But when you start talking about how to align fixed asset depreciation with accounting best practices, well, my friend, you're talking about a very concrete workplace requirement.

Cheers,

Ned

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by El Spamolito on Mar. 30, 2010

Urgh, that link above is supposed to be:

http://www.xtuple.org/node/2456

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