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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Open Source Motivations
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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I think the "gift economy" and "peer respect" aspects are often overemphasized as reasons for programmers to contribute to open source projects. Most people contribute fixes and new features for selfish reasons: They're using the program and have fixed bugs or implemented new features that they need in their own daily use of the system, whether they use it at home or for business purposes. I remember Linus saying at one time that now he wanted to concentrate his own work on power-saving features for the Linux kernel, because he just got a new laptop and felt that the battery time needed improvement.
Pretty much the size of it, IMHO. People will do all sorts of work without formal compensation - but that will be stuff they want to do, and - in general - won't include 'finishing touches' type work. Think about it - how many unfunded open source efforts come with reasonable documentation? Or a decent GUI? Or a set of configuration files you can figure out? The 'grunt work' that no one wants to do doesn't typically get done unless someone is funding it.
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