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posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @12:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-is-your-motivation dept.

Open source software development is a model that provides free public access to software packages and source code. Since programmers can freely contribute improvements, bug fixes and modifications, open source development gives rise to communities of authors and users that can number into the thousands for some software packages. The free, open-source Linux operating system is a prominent open source success story.

Another is the R environment for statistical computing, supported by the R Project for Statistical Computing. Freely available via the open-source GNU General Public License, R has evolved into an invaluable tool for professionals in data analysis fields across many industries. A group of researchers in Austria became interested in the motivations and values of the hundreds of people who give their time and energy so freely to advance such a large technological project. As there were no known empirical studies investigating these psychological factors, they designed a study to collect data from a large group of R developers. They have published the results of their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It seems illogical for software developers to give away their skills and efforts from an economic point of view. The authors hypothesized that a different set of motivations was required for the successful development of such a large software environment. They sent surveys to about 4,300 software package developers, and ultimately received around 764 responses.

Analyzing the collected data, the authors concluded that hybrid motivations and social characteristics were broadly responsible for the success of the R project. Hybrid motivations refer to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; among R project developers, purely intrinsic motivations like personal satisfaction and purely extrinsic motivations like receiving compensation were found to be less important.

I do it for the drink comps at all the best clubs. And the babes.


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  • (Score: 1) by jonathan on Friday November 27 2015, @06:50PM

    by jonathan (3950) on Friday November 27 2015, @06:50PM (#268745)

    I'm just pointing to it because it's in regards to the topic so I don't see why I would need to explain it.
    Maybe it's just me but it seems pretty self explanatory to those who view it starting at the time I gave where the video talks about open source and what motivates people to work on it. I don't see what secret you think is in there. Perhaps you could explain it to me?
    I also don't see what large amount of time people are dedicating here. I've seen people link to web sites with tons of text. Should people be warned the minute a web site has more than a paragraph of text as that would also mean dedicating a large amount of time to read it?

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:56AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:56AM (#268944) Journal

    Some want others to burn endless quantities of their time in order to distill large bodies of knowledge into easily digestible soundbites, so as to relieve them of the burden of processing information. It is a jejeune quality that does crop up with disappointing regularity, even here on Soylent. It's a pity because it discourages the very thing you did, which is to share additional information, resources, and perspective on a geek subject of interest. The video you linked to is one of my favorites of the last 5 years and it's worth watching in its entirety because a simple phrase cannot do justice to the story telling in it. So thank you for doing it. It's illuminating.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.