
Researchers Study Motivations of Open-Source Programmers - cargoshortsrule
http://phys.org/news/2015-11-open-source-programmers.html
======
jimhefferon
None of these "researchers" would ever wonder why a person would spend time
playing in a string quartet when they could, economically, be making money
behind the counter at Arby's. The idea that doing the work is rewarding never
occurs, apparently.

~~~
nmrm2
This isn't fair -- the researcher's claim is that intrinsic motivations are
_part of_ R developer's motivations, and actually designed their study to
determine to what role intrinsic motivations play in OSS development.

Even by the second page of the paper it's very clear the study is designed to
read off intrinsic motivations, both value-laden and pure enjoyment:

 _This framework also accounts for potential interaction effects between
intrinsic and extrinsic types of motivation. For the intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation subscales, 36 items are included in our questionnaire. Each
subscale (i.e., enjoyment based intrinsic motivation, self-reinforcement,
obligation-based motivation, integrated regulation, identification,
introjection-based regulation, external regulation) consists of four to eight
items..._

The real question (which the authors are silent on and the journalist
helpfully mischaracterizes) is whether these researchers' results generalize
to non-R-ecosystem OSS development.

------
zamalek
We've known the answer for some time: mastery. It's the same reason we play
sports, instruments and other "unproductive" pastimes - we desire to get good
at something and enjoy demonstrating that expertise.

~~~
nmrm2
The fact that these researchers focused exclusively on developers in a single
ecosystem (the R language) is, in my mind, a death blow to the
generalizability of their study. That is, their conclusions might be relevant
to R developers, but not to open source developers in general.

We all know that different ecosystems typically have different values.

But more importantly, R developers are particularly non-representative of the
more general open-source ecosystem. Based on anecdotal evidence, I believe
it's highly likely that academics and people who primarily identify with non-
CS fields/disciplines are over-represented in the R community when compared to
other communities.

(Note: At least within the text of the paper, the researchers DON'T claim that
their results generalize to all OSS developers, and don't even claim their
results generalize to all R developers!)

~~~
voltagex_
If I was going to focus on a single community I'd look at .NET - it's gone
from closed to open in a big way, and I don't just mean today's announcements.

It's really quite interesting to see how it morphed over the years.

~~~
zamalek
I'm a .Net developer myself but I honestly think that C++ and JS have become
prime examples of OSS communities. In contrast, if you want a good story .Net
is the way to go - it has definitely gone down an interesting road.

------
kevindeasis
From my experience, which is purely anecdotal some open source programmers
love giving back to the community. Some of them have motivation rooting from
them learning programming through open-source materials and feedback. Thus,
wanting to give back to the community.

Some people enjoy it, and can get benefits from it, such as gaining experience
and reference for a person's portfolio. There have been some people who have
been getting more job offers from open-source repositories than their online
job application.

Companies and programmers actually benefit from open source compared to
closed-source, look at this dicussion [1]

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10574555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10574555)

------
nmrm2
The researchers focused exclusively on developers in the R language ecosystem,
and as far as I can tell they scope the claims in their paper to only the R
ecosystem. For whatever reason, the headline and lede instead emphasize a
piece of pure speculation toward the end of the paper (generalizing to other
open source communities) rather than the actual substance of the paper
(exclusivley focused on the R ecosystem, and not even claiming that their
results fully generalize even to all R developers, let alone all OSS
developers).

Here's why I think this work doesn't generalize: Academics and people who
don't primarily identify as software engineers are over-represented in the R
community, when compared against other open source projects. I think the set
of answers you'd get from e.g., the developers of more traditional types of
open source projects (editors, compilers, databases, games, OSes,
frameworks/libraries, etc.) are fundamentally different.

While I'm on my soap box, the other mistake that researchers who study open
source developers often make is focusing on _very successful_ open source
projects, and then implicitly or explicitly generalizing those results to the
huge hoard of open source developers. (Implicit generalization goes something
like this: Intro: there are so many open source developers -- understanding
their motivation is important! -- Actual study: let's look at the motivation
of contributors to the top 1% of projects -- Conclusion: we think these
results generalize to other projects. Note that the authors of this study
avoid this pattern, but the journalist doesn't.) But of course, the
motivations of the vast majority of OSS developers are going to be
fundamentally different from those developers who have built extremely
successful and high-profile systems.

Overall, I think this is a really nice and interesting paper about the R
ecosystem. I just wish the journalist had chosen a different headline and
lede.

------
pegas1
When you ask 4000 and get 700 answers, you learned about motivations of the
minority that answers surways only. No way to generalise to os population

------
andrewclunn
I share my code for three main reasons:

1) Other people sometimes find bugs I missed. It's like free outsourced
testing.

2) The connections I make by doing this occasionally lead to opportunities
down the line.

3) Other people being grateful and thanking me boosts my ego and makes me feel
good about myself.

There's plenty of selfish reasons to write code that you share.

------
saurik
"Safari cannot open the page because too many redirects occurred." :(

~~~
wslh
Same in Chrome for Android.

------
trhway
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3N...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3NCw83LVWFo#t=56)

"why would he do that?"

