What's Your Open Source Motivation?

by Mike Gunderloy - Mar. 26, 2008Comments (5)

The open source community is composed of diverse individuals with a variety of motivations. Anyone who's been around for a while has heard the phrase "herding cats" applied, and it generally fits. Some more evidence of this comes from a survey run by OpenLogic. They talked to members of their own Expert Community - folks with good experience who have signed up to help resolve enterprise support incidents - and asked, among other things, who they worked for.

What they found was that 50% of their respondents worked for a proprietary software company, 26% were doing open source consulting, and 18% were working for a non-software company. They also asked about motivations for getting involved with OpenLogic. Despite the fact that these experts are paid, only 52% were in it for the money; 64% said they just wanted to support open source software (obviously, respondents could pick more than one answer). And even though these people were committers on big projects, only 48% said they'd want to work for the company associated with the software that they were supporting.

Even though this survey isn't statistically significant (50 people from a self-selected group that probably doesn't reflect open source developers as a whole), the results seem to mesh well with other discussions I've seen. Some of us contribute to open source just to scratch our own little itches on particular projects; some want to make money; some want to change the world. It's a wonder that we can all live in one big tent.

What about you? What keeps you coming back to pitch in on open source development? Or do you just leave it for other folks to do, for one reason or another?


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Craig Harris uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



5 Comments
 

I think people pitch in on projects they use or find useful for themselves. Everyone has to derive some value for their time and while contributing/social service is fulfilling, I'd imagine that it is not the only reason. Beefing up your cv, "Showing Off" your skills, etc. etc. are definitely part of the game. I am not a contributor but more of a "business user" and my main motivation is the ability to get superior products for almost nothing (I do have to engage consultants from time to time).


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It impresses the chicks!


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After consuming so much Open Source and building solutions on top of existing apps, people feel like giving back/paying-it-forward and sharing things they have learned. Not everyone is a committer into the core of projects, but a lot of people have built a ton of enhancements that they themselves would like to see enhanced and improved!


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The declared motivation does not need to be the true reason people participate. I would like to see that analysed.


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Almost two years ago to the day a very nasty botware virus nailed me despite a paid-up ZoneAlarm Pro and all possible XP updates. I spent three days trying to disinfect with no joy, and decided "no more".

Downloaded Ubuntu on a friend's machine, backed up the XP laptop to an external disk, nuked the laptop's drive with Ubuntu (Dapper), loaded my data back in and never looked back. I have never booted Windows again on any system I own.

And while I had extensive Win-geek experience, I had never so much as touched any Unix-derivative system before, ever.

It's been an adventure but I have zero regrets. Well, 'cept maybe for installing Edgy in late beta, that was a mess :) but it was still possible to recover from that without data loss...

Jim March

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