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: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 27 2015, @12:35PM
"I do it for the drink comps at all the best clubs. And the babes."
Never trust a man who claims to be thinking of the children.
(Score: 4, Funny) by NotSanguine on Friday November 27 2015, @12:47PM
"I do it for the drink comps at all the best clubs. And the babes."
Never trust a man who claims to be thinking of the children.
I don't think it's the children he's thinking about. I suspect he has more carnal [wikipedia.org] plans for those babes.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 27 2015, @03:17PM
Mmm, pork. Actually, his wooly friends would be more practical--velcro gloves don't stick well to rind.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by moondoctor on Friday November 27 2015, @01:10PM
Pretty specific project. Seems to me that different projects would have different motivations. I'd bet open source graphics driver folks would do their thing for different reasons than R, Kernel or Gimp people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @06:09PM
Voluntary survey, will also only get answers from those who care.
(Score: 3, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Friday November 27 2015, @01:22PM
Ok, not only for the money. But the research seems to be based on wrong assumptions. In my workplace we are using quite a lot of open source packages, and I know that a couple of my colleagues get involved with project owners to provide fixes and improvements to them, because in the long run it is much cheaper than maintaining a patched branch. Others contribute because having participated in high profile projects can be a nice bullet point in the CV. E.g. we are using Jenkins for CI purposes, and we have specific requirements for plugins and so on. A candidate who already has some experience in Jenkins plugin development would definitely have a bonus, and there might be contracts going to externals if they have the right set of experience. Of course, these fixes would be provided to maintainers, not the least to save us the maintenance of a separate branch for those plugins.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Subsentient on Friday November 27 2015, @01:31PM
I do it to become more than I am, and to "pay my bill of existence". That is, I want to leave something good behind.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @08:06PM
That is partly why I don't leave the house. Don't consume resources you don't need. Live a simple life. Do good works yes, but choosing to do nothing, the right nothing for the right reasons has the same amount of impact on the quality of the world we will leave behind.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday November 27 2015, @01:34PM
For me: whenever I have contributed, it was because I was using some open source program, worked on something which I considered an improvement, and shared with the original creators. Basically: I ran into something (a problem, or an annoyance), and then I signal it or take care of it and pass on the fix. (yes, here I consider "contribute" in a wide definition)
Upon looking back to a few cases, each feels to me like a case of reciprocation. So what persuades you [bc.edu] to contribute?
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Friday November 27 2015, @03:07PM
I stand with the "freedom for the end user" philosophy, and that's why I'd share my time, skill and effort; I believe this for everybody, not just for me, and obviously we build upon other people's work.
Obviously not all software needs to be like this, nor it's my only (or even primary) way of work.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 27 2015, @03:22PM
I agree with this, and would say for me it's also the subversive aspect of it. So much of the world is built on the premise that the few should be allowed to control the many, and open source is a great way to erode that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday November 27 2015, @01:41PM
Its a pity they didn't correlate the obvious analogy with academics. The pyramidical structure of salary similar to sports implies none of them statistically will end up as $200K/yr tenured professors. Yet heres an army of grad students working way below minimum wage per hour, documenting male privilege or whatever non-CS academics do all day.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @01:49PM
Meh, what a turkey of story.
(Score: 1) by jonathan on Friday November 27 2015, @02:32PM
I think that this RSA lecture Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us [youtube.com] which is from 5 years ago already sums up the reasons pretty well.
While I do suggest you view the entire lecture, the part in regards to Linux and other open source programs starts at 7:06.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @04:43PM
When citing a video that you want people to actually watch it is necessary to provide a summary of the video. Otherwise you are asking people to dedicated a large amount of their time just to find out your secret.
(Score: 1) by jonathan on Friday November 27 2015, @06:50PM
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
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @03:15PM
A bunch of for-profit companies contribute programmer time to these efforts. There motivation is not the same as that of an individual.
BTW - I used to contribute time and effort to an open-source project but gave up after losing patience with the assholes that ran the project. There's only so much gratuitous abuse a person can take. My main offence was discovering lots of bugs and non-standard stuff in the code written by the project leader.
(Score: 2) by bziman on Friday November 27 2015, @03:52PM
Long before I had any idea people could get paid to write software, I wrote software to meet my own needs. With the advent of the web, I found that a lot of the software I needed was available for free. So logically, whenever I wrote software, if I thought it was generally applicable, I shared it. My experiences with commercial consumer software have always been pretty disappointing. It always felt pretty obvious to me that the best software is written by folks who are writing it for their own use, rather than writing it to sell to someone else.
Sure, now I make a living writing commercial software, but it is mostly huge enterprise systems that no individual or small group of programmers would ever need, but that big companies do need and are willing to pay for. It doesn't make much sense to open source it, because the user base is relatively small, and not primarily programmers. But I still work with open source tools, and make contributions where I can.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday November 27 2015, @04:24PM
Can high quality, professional grade FOSS be developed for user bases which are not primarily programmers? I'm thinking things like CAM for 5+ axis with verification, something that's around $50k per seat (Mastercam plus Vericut) right now.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @07:42PM
how bout
* http://camotics.org/ [camotics.org]
* http://linuxcnc.org/ [linuxcnc.org]
* http://www.opencascade.com/content/core-technology [opencascade.com]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday November 27 2015, @10:22PM
Cammotics is 3 axis only, and is a verifier without CAM. Linuxcnc is a machine controller, not a CAM software. Opencascade is not a CAM software but a set of tools which could be used to help build CADCAM software.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday December 02 2015, @01:06PM
Last time I checked, 3 axes are enough to span space. 4 axes could get you some flexibility in time as well - but I'm stumped what one'd use the fifth axis for.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Thursday December 03 2015, @12:14AM
The fourth and fifth axis' are rotary. Look up five axis machining on YouTube for some cool examples.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday November 27 2015, @07:04PM
This is normal i think. When some specific domain knowledge and a programmer intersect then that programmer is more likely to write a functionally better tool for that specific domain. Often times a domain expert is designing the product and the programmer is making it. Worse case is you have an amateur in a specific domain who is designing the product. This is actually pretty common because companies don't often hire domain experts ($$$). They just use the people they already have and likely copy a competing product's features.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(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
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Friday November 27 2015, @06:37PM
I code, make graphics, and design hardware from time to time for two reasons: because I want or need them for my own uses, and because I want to make something that others can use or enjoy. Unless I've accidentally misused a license somewhere, all of my stuff is Free and free (for non-commercial use), and that's the way they'll always stay.
I do make a tiny income from commercial sales of the hardware (by way of someone else who does the work), but as long as the recipient likes what they got, finds it useful, or is able to forego buying and can build their own, I'm happy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @07:56PM
While working for a PhD, you get payed to do research. If that research involves writing a custom piece of software to analyze your data, you should release the software source code for several reasons.
Most importantly, you are paid to get the research results, NOT TO DISTRIBUTE SOFTWARE. After you graduate, you are supposed to work with different data, using the skills you have developed along the way, not to sustain yourself by asking for more money for simply making new copies of the code that has already been paid for by a funding agency.
Also quite important: other people may use your code, and they will most likely improve it; if you ever need to use it in the future, you will then have an improved tool for free (literally; at most you need to invest some time to familiarize yourself with new functionality, but that's a lot less effort than writing everything from scratch).
Personally, I've never used R. I did however use numpy a lot, and I seriously considered contributing to it (but I don't have the time to prepare my contributions adequately). When I get a chance to teach a certain class again, I will most likely take advantage to properly build a subpackage for scipy or numpy, since I would have to work on my package for the class anyway. Reason? I want numpy and scipy to be as good as possible, because I want to be able to use them for the rest of my life, for free.
My opinion is that most contributors to R are PhD students, postdocs and professors who want a serious tool for their work; and they probably have little patience for questionnaires sent by people they don't know.