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Phoenix666 writes:

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.

Original Submission