What Motivates Open Source developers
Loreta Mihor
It can be hard to imagine that many of the applications and programs we use today are built by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people all over the world. Open-source software (OSS) is a rapidly growing industry that provides many benefits to the individuals and businesses who use it, as well as to its programmers.
For many outside of the IT world, the concept of contributing to open-source software seems like a remarkable psychological phenomenon, as many of the contributors do it by their own free will and are quite often unpaid for it. The thought of contributing to something that requires a good amount of time without getting a dime for their work can be hard to fully understand.
However, for developers especially, contributing to open-source software provides many valuable advantages and opens doors to a number of highly lucrative and rewarding opportunities, and there are not too many other industries that can boast the massive number of global contributions like the open-source community can.
For developers, contributing to OSS means that they not only practice their programming skills, but that they also learn and gain feedback from more accomplished programmers. This jumping-in-the-deep-end style of learning provides aspiring programmers with real-life, first-hand experience and greatly accelerates their learning curve.
Another motivation that is closely related to the first point is that OSS provides young developers with useful and valuable experience often required by companies for employment, even for internships and entry-level positions.
Contributing to OSS allows developers to become better at reading code produced by others, finding and fixing bugs, and adding their code into the main repository. These are all activities developers experience working in a tech company.
Gaining real experience before applying for an internship can not only help secure a position at a well-sought-after tech company, but can also help move you into full-time work and accelerate your career.
Most people who are passionate about something strive to be recognized for the quality work they produce, and for some, developing software is a huge passion. Recognition from members from the OSS community not only encourages and motivates a developer to improve his or her skills, it can also create a number of opportunities, such as job offers and invitations to attend conferences and events, etc.
Another important aspect of this point is self-recognition and personal achievement. Many developers are extremely determined to become the best developer they can be to meet certain personal goals, and having your code accepted by a big OSS project is a considered a massive achievement.
While the increase in job prospects at big tech firms is one of the main effects of OSS contribution, there are also a number of other opportunities that can arise, such as consulting and freelance work.
This desire to contribute can also resonate on a business level. If a business owner or company is using a piece of open-source software and would like to make some changes or add new features to meet a certain business need, then this is also a real possibility. The result is a win-win situation, as the business gets a new feature (either by developing it themselves or suggesting it to the core team) and the software also receives a new feature that can often be utilized by other users.
Here at Clearcode, our development teams regular utilize open-source software in their projects due to the many benefits it offers. We consider ourselves part of the OSS community, therefore we contribute to it. Learn more about our contributions to open-source software by clicking here.
This is the 4th year since I have started doing Open Source. To be completely honest, I began to feel things were getting out of my capacity more and more often. I am still not sure if I have ever been through actual burnout or not, but I surely have experienced the ups and downs of my productivity and motivation periodically.
Since I started to learn programming and knowing about open source, I have been dreaming about being a full-time open source developer. When I was in college, I was eager to get recognized by the open source community, trying hard to "figure out" some impactful work that I could accomplish. All of a sudden, you will reach a pivotal point, where your project might unexpectedly take off, or you have been invited to join a big project - in a moment, you will start to feel all those excitements as well as the responsibilities suddenly come along. In a few days, when the initial excitement starts to fade away, you start to realize that it also means so much responsibility and other things that you have never thought about. Despite that I have been trying all my college years to get into open source, when I finally stepped into it, I realized how much I was unprepared.
One interesting thing about Open Source is that one is probably never prepared. You might encounter tricky technical problems, or have to keep up with the new technologies, but there are also a bunch of things other than coding that you have to deal with. You have to be your customer support to answer questions; be a designer, a writer to prepare nice documentation; a project manager to keep the project on track; a team leader to onboard new contributors and keep the team motivated; marketing your stuff; speaking at conferences; and so on. Those are the "side-effects" of being an open source developer, many things come to you in a bundle, not only the code.
Might be overwhelming it seems. But if you take those challenges and get through them one by one, gradually, you might find that they are quite fun and rewarding. In the end, I appreciate a lot about all those chances for pushing me out of my comfort zone and forcing myself to improve. Throughout these 4 years in Open Source, despite still being not perfect at many things, I managed to speak English much more confidently. I have given talks at many conferences, some of which even have thousands of attendees. I still get super nervous before every talk, but at least I am no longer afraid of doing it.
While also, keep a certain velocity and momentum is also very important to me. The majority of my motivation is driven by the feeling of accomplishment after I have finished something. I could be in an excellent flow when I can create the feedback loop of iterating things out then delivering.
So, to say, I usually pick Quality and Velocity. In the beginning, the scope of my projects was quite clear and small. I managed to keep the quality high, deliver things fast, and get feedback from the community quickly. At that time, I was able to stay productive and motivated to keep working on those projects.
The amount of work required to maintain multiple high-traffic open source projects is honestly massive. I should have reached my limit a long while ago without help from the community. While the community helps me a lot, it still, takes a lot of energy to communicate, coordinate, as well as consistently context-switching. Over time, I accumulated many things I had to do myself, many ideas I wanted to try, and many things I wanted to improve.
I know my opinions must be heavily biased. If it ever triggers any thoughts or feelings for you, I am curious to hear what you think or what are your ways. You can leave some comments under this tweet or mastodon, or send me an email at h...@antfu.me if you prefer private conversations. Looking forward to hearing from you!
The reasons people contribute to free and open source (FOSS) projects has been a topic of much interest. However, the research on this topic dates back 10 or more years, and much has changed in the world since then. This article shares seven insights from a recent research study that revisited old motivation studies and asked open source contributors what motivates them today.
These insights can be used by open source community managers who want to grow a community, organizations that want to understand how community members behave, or anyone working with others in open source. Understanding what motivates today's contributors helps us make impactful decisions.
We need to look into the origins of open source and the free software movement to understand why studying what motivates contributors is so fascinating. When the free software movement started, it was in defiance of corporations using copyright and license terms to restrict user and developer freedoms. The free software movement is a story of rebellion. It was difficult for many to understand how high-quality software emerged from a movement of people who "scratched their own itch" or "volunteered" their skills. At the core of the free software movement was a collaborative way for creating software that became interesting to companies as well. The emergence of open source was a philosophical shift to make this collaboration method available and acceptable to businesses.
The state of the art of research into motivation in open source is a publication from 2012 that summarizes research studies from more than a decade prior. Gordon Haff reviewed this topic in Why do we contribute to open source software? and Ruth Suehle in Drive and motivation: Daniel Pink webcast recap.
Over the last 10 years, much has changed in open source. With corporations' increasing interest in open source and having paid employees working on open source projects, it was high time to revisit motivation in open source.
In our scientific study, The shifting sands of motivation: Revisiting what drives contributors in open source, we investigated why people join FOSS projects and why they continue contributing. One of our goals was to study how contributors' motivations have changed since the 2000s. A second goal was to take the research to the next level and investigate how people's motivations change as they continue contributing. The research is based on a questionnaire answered by almost 300 FOSS contributors in late 2020.
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