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For The Love Of Open Source
Jim Madison writes: "Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!", it is only natural in our traditional political economy that software be developed with public funding in the safety of academia when the markets are immature. Have moved into a post-scarcity gift culture or is the report correct that open source uses and needs the subsidy of public investment to grow within traditional industrial capitalism?"
This discussion comes up on Slashdot every couple of months or so.
The article's assumptions might be true for some people, but there are still many, many people who still develop out of love for doing something useful. In fact, there are probably more today because the Internet has allowed people to contribute and connect that never could before. The network effect has been made possible by the Internet.
I develop open source software because, yes, I do love it and I want to do something useful. One of the primary reasons I got a PhD and live an academic life is so I can do this and still support my family. I have must students contribute to my projects as part of their assignments, as well. Many of them have gotten the open source bug and are contributing now as well.
I develop open source because:
1. I don't want to support it. Let people find usefulness in it. Let them contribute as well. But I don't want to spend 80 percent of my waking hours solving naive questions.
2. I don't want the risk that comes with marketing software for money. I don't want to risk my livelihood by starting a business to support my software, either. Really marketing something takes 3-5 good years of your life to do it right, and it involves risk.
3. Yes, I like to help people and I benefit from what they contribute. I'm not anal about having to have GNU software only, but I do support what they do. I feel like I am giving back to the common pool when I develop open source apps.
4. I am not a competitive person. In fact, I absolutely dislike it. I prefer to develop a useful app to the best of my abilities. I find joy in the fact that if someone else solves the same problem I do, we can e-mail each other and combine our efforts and be friendly to each other rather than compete and try to drive one another out of business. Everyone benefits when we work together.
Disclaimer: I am not socialist. I love free and open economies. IMHO, competitive business economies are the best thing we've come up with yet. They keep people honest. But in those economies, there is plenty of room for community-welfare ideas as well.