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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.
(Score: 2) by N3Roaster on Friday November 27 2015, @07:46PM
This lines up with my experience as well. Professionally I'm not really a programmer, I run coffee roasting operations at a little roaster retail shop. When I first started to look at using computers to help me with that work, there were a few packages commercially available covering different aspects of what I did. They were all very expensive with no thought given to interoperability with other systems, Windows only, and I saw evidence of fundamental design flaws and little hope for upgrades (things are a little better now, but if I were making the decision again today I would likely reach the same conclusion). So I did some research, decided that I could prototype a minimum viable project cheaply enough to see if this would be a worthwhile use of time, and refine it from there. Now when I want a new feature, I just sit down and add it, so the motivation is having a better tool for my work and having control over how that tool evolves over time. Plenty of other companies have similar systems developed in house, but I was able to release mine as free (MIT license) software which has brought some additional benefits that I wouldn't have experienced had I kept everything private. Most significantly, it's a conversation starter. There are a ton of people in the industry at companies of all sizes all over the world who talk to me about what they're doing because they're using my software (that and the YouTube videos which a surprising number of people have used for training). It gives me a broader perspective than I'd have just working in my own shop. I also get feature requests and new use cases. Those often need to be massaged into what people really need instead of what they think they need (something that newer commercial software in the area has sometimes struggled with, giving people what they're asking for instead of something that's useful), but some of those have been hugely beneficial to me and are things that I would not have considered on my own or things that I would not have done as well without the conversations with others. The bug reports can be nice to get as well.
Of course, the occasional free drink, bottle of wine, or multi-thousand dollar piece of hardware to play with have also been nice to get.
Typica - Free software for coffee roasting professionals. [typica.us]
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Friday November 27 2015, @09:16PM
(Score: 2) by N3Roaster on Friday November 27 2015, @09:30PM
GitHub repo: https://github.com/N3Roaster/typica [github.com]
There's a link at the top of that for Mac/Windows builds and incomplete documentation that at least covers the most important points. Linux users still need to figure out how to compile it themselves. The project site will be moving to its own domain/getting a nice redesign once 2.0 is ready.
Typica - Free software for coffee roasting professionals. [typica.us]
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday November 29 2015, @04:06AM