How Should Companies Grant Recognition To Developers?

Ken Broadfoot asks: "I work for a major computer chip manufacturer and we are recieving input (patches and code) for some new Linux device drivers (network cards). How would you, as an open source developer, like recognition for the valuable work you are doing? My suggestion to the Powers That Be was to offer credit on the web, some network interface cards, and perhaps a credit file along with the source code for the driver, however there may be other ways to thank developers that we haven't thought of, and were looking for readers thoughts on the matter." It's always nice to see large corporations willing to take the time to thank individuals for making their products better.

Comments

Hardware

[hirschma]

Give 'em hardware - the latest stuff, put them on hardware beta tests, etc. Don't worry if they'll agree upfront to do anything with it - my guess is that if they've done it before, they'll do it again. Low risk, high reward investment.

Re:Hardware

[Jezz]

Seems very logical. Give them the hardware and all the documentation let them do with it what they will.

Also; publish the documentation online somewhere so others can port things to your hardware and make sure people can find it. This will help the open source community a great deal. Maybe host the source code on your web site and let one of them manage it for you. This will help them and you.

Nice effort! (Who is it you work for?)

Re: Hardware

[dsplat]

Absolutely! Give away some of the cards that you want drivers for to the people who have shown te ability to do the job. I can't think of a better way for both parties to get something they want. If you have one or two key people who are really helping, consider hiring them. Keep the contract open source friendly. They agree to work for you writing drivers for your hardware, but the drivers themselves remain open source. Such things have happened before. The amount of the incentive depends on the amount of work and its value.

That's a tough one

[OlympicSponsor]

If only there were some kind of symbolic object the corporation could give the developer to indicate their appreciation. But not some dead trophy-style object--something dynamic and useful. Something where they could keep the value even if they lost the physical medium (via the use of trades, say). In fact, we could expand this usage from corp to developer until everyone could trade these objects to each other in exchange for goods and services. But what'll we call it?
--
MailOne

About box

[www.sorehands.com]

Putting names in the about box is nice.

There are some problems with that.....
1. If someone is not happy with the tech support weenie (meaning their response is format and re-install), they get your name from the about box and call you.
2. If you leave the company and the product turns to garbage, do you want your name associated with it?

Endorsements?

[TopShelf]

You could bring a couple of these developers in, turn a camera on, and ask just why they decided to contribute to the project. Voila! Instant promotional material for your product, your company, and your relationship with the open source community. Give them a reasonable fee for the promotional spot, and make a donation to a charity of their choosing in their name to boot.

Wow

[bmongar]

A company actually wants to give credit for work they could have for free. Cool. I would say definately add some extra credits in the source code that they contributed. The cards are a great idea, above and beyond expectations. Also a credits page on the website is good. What else could work you ask? If they are repeated contributors you may want to contract with them for upcoming products.

Simple idea..

[abelsson]

Why not ask 'em? Say something along the lines of "You're really helping the company with your work. We really like it. Is there anything we can do for you?"

-henrik

Publish specs

[SurfsUp]

How would you, as an open source developer, like recognition for the valuable work you are doing?

Credit in the code is worth more than credit on a web page. That just needs a one liner - what, who, email, date. (That line will probably already be in the patch) Hardware is good - especially new hardware that nobody has yet. A 'come see me at XXX trade show, I'll buy you a beer' is worth more than you can imagine. Best of all has nothing to do with giving credit - just make sure the full specs of the hardware are published on the web. Thats the best thanks of all.
--

Singing CEO

[Groovy Aardvark]

Have the CEO call them personally and sing the GPL license's text to the "We Will Rock You" melody.

You've already taken the biggest step =:-)

[drenehtsral]

I think that you've already taken the biggest step: Acknowledging that open source developers are making useful and valuable contributions. For the most part, open source developers (or at least all the ones i know) are always happy to work/play (often it's the same) in an environment of good will and openness. I think that is the most important thing. For instance, if a hardware company doesn't produce a linux driver for their XYZ widget, it would be nice if they made hardware specs and possibly the code for their windows driver available so that people could work with it, and soon enough the XYZ widget would be supported under linux and BeOS and probably some other OSs nobody's ever even heard of...

Call their parents

[drivers]

Call their parents and tell them "I am calling from [a large computer hardware company], and just wanted to tell you what a helpful and intelligent programmer your [son/daughter] is. Don't be too concerned if they'd rather play on the computer than watch TV like everyone else."

I think I'm just kidding, but you never know.

Does it have to translate to $$?

[dmorin]

Some things that have worked for me in the past, in varying degrees:

• Hearing the president of the company mention me, by name, during his state-of-the-company speech.
• Letting me get published. Many companies don't the engineers do things like this, but it's a great way to be recognized in your industry.
• Letting me speak at conferences. Another big recognition factor.
• Letting my name show up in the press. The most hated PHB in my company right now is the guy who, while he was here, instituted the "My name and my name only shows up in the press releases" rule. He once even referred to me as "The Wiz" in an interview rather than say my name. UG.
• Random bonuses. It's always nice to just get a big wad of cash, especially when it's not on a fixed company schedule. It says "You're so appreciated that we're breaking the rules."
• On that same note, anything that feels like "Well yes, we have rules, but we're breaking them for you."

Things that don't work:

• Embarrassing displays. At the christmas party don't have an awards ceremony and make your best engineers stand up in front of all their coworkers. No better way to say "Hey, you people sitting down, you're not doing a very good job!" It was one thing for the president to mention my name -- most of the hundreds of people listening probably don't even know me -- but if he'd called me up on stage or something that would have sucked.
• Anything that blatantly mucks with team morale. While walking over to a team outing and crossing the street, a VP once yelled "Ok, everybody form a circle around Duane in case a car comes!" That's charming -- telling people that they have value as human shields. Not too funny. I don't know if any of the other guys cared, but it made me feel lousy.
• Non-perk perks. "Have a PalmV with Omnisky!" doesn't really work if it's just a loaner, and worse if you have to sign up for the service yourself and then request a reimbursement check every month.

Duane

Re:What about stock?

[technos]

Heh.. I don't think they'd have any monetary value, really.. If I were to receive, say a nicely lithographed Intel stock cert, it would go in a frame. Serve as a reminder saying 'Hey, people really appreciated me fixing that timeout problem on the new Intel Pro II 10/100. That feels good.'

Plus it would have great geek value. "Hey, Jim. Why do you have a single share of IBM stock hanging in your cube?" "Fixed a really gnarly bug in the virtual network drivers for the 390."

Reward developers by having good policies

[Bruce Perens]

Most manufacturers don't even take the first step to help developers, which is document their hardware. That way, the developers can achieve their primary goal, which is to get hardware working with their system.

Secondary to that, I and other developers would feel rewarded if the company's policies were in general supportive of free software - for example, their patent policy - do they use patents abusively? Are they willing to blanket-license their patents for use in GPL code? That's more important than my personal credit.

Regarding personal credit, most developers are satisfied to have their name attached to code where the other developers can see it. A "credits" file is nice, and it makes sense for large projects like the Linux kernel where there would otherwise be a different name every two lines of code. For smaller projects, it's nice to have a credits file on your web site and distributed with your software in its documentation directory, but it's optional.

If your developer liason is able to seed effective developers with new hardware versions, they'll appreciate that and you will get more help for your efforts.

Thanks

Bruce

Recommendations

[goliard]

In addition to many of the things already suggested, my recommendation is: recommendations.

When one of those coders needs a new job or is applying to a school, they should be able to get a letter of recommendation from a contact they worked with in your corp, or be able to list that contact as a professional reference.

Since they might not even think to ask (since you are neither employer nor teacher), take the initiative of offering this service to them.

And if the coder says "Gee, thanks, but I don't plan on needing any recommendations in the next 6mos", say "OK, we'll write something up, for you to hold on to for when you do need it."

Telling someone you think he's a great coder is nice. Telling potential employers/professors he's a great coder, now that's worth something!

What Bruce said.

[Russ Nelson]

I'll second what Bruce said. You want to reward the activity, not necessarily the people. So make it even easier the next time. Commit to sending some of those extremely valuable and rare pre-production prototypes to free software developers (presumably but not necessarily the same people who helped you this time). Put your hardware documentation up on the web in a .PDF file.

That should be step #0, even before you think about rewarding the current effort. If you think that what happened now was good, then Make Sure It Happens Again. Even better, make a big stink about it. Tell everyone "Hey, we worked with free software developers [insert names here], and we got these drivers for it."

Because there's still a lot of advocacy needed. For example, I bought an IOMagic digital camera. Serial port interface. No hardware documentation, though.
-russ

cognitive dissonance in action

[brokeninside]

a study found that if someone was given a mind-numbing task to perform for an hour, they would be more likely to give a positive evaluation of the task if they are paid $1 at the end of it vs. $20

You are not remembering significant details of this study. Volunteers were drafted for an "exciting and interesting" study. The volunteers were told by the subjects just before them about how interesting the study was. The subjects were then giving a boring and repetitive task to do. After rating the task on how interesting it was, the subjects were either given $1 or $20 to hang around to tell the next subject how interesting the task was.

In follow up interviews, the people that were paid $1 rated the boring and repetitive task as being more interesting than they did in their original evaluations.

Dissonance theory explains the behavior because the people that were paid $20 felt justified in lying about how interesting the task was because they were paid quite well to lie. The people that were paid only $1 did not have a good justification for lying, so their brain went into revision mode to overcome cognitive dissonance. These people remembered the task as being more interesting because they didn't want to think of themselves as liars.

Therefore, companies that have boring open source projects to work on, should give minimal rewards to open source hackers to recruit other hackers by telling them how interesting the boring coding is. ;^O

have a day,

-l

Status Clothing

[haid]

In the early days of Java, Sun used to give out a T-shirt with their mascot "Duke" holding up a surf board with a spider on it, as thanks for finding a confirmed bug in Java. Within Sun, a big status thing used to be those leather jackets with the Java logo (which can be bought for some $200 to $300) Put your logo on something that looks professional, and make it exclusive. Bingo, it gives thanks, and maximally targets an advertisement for the Tech crowd!