Why Programmers Work For Free

[Alex Snow]

I thought this message was pretty interesting Since I'm one of those
Computer club geeks Working on programs in my spare time.
I didn't relize that many of the programmers who make the open source
movement happen are really professionals?

Why Programmers Work For Free

Open source a needed outlet for programming pros

By Thomas C Greene in Washington <
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23935.html>

Posted: 05/02/2002 at 04:24 GMT

Open source hackers are very likely to be programmers with a decade of
professional experience employed by a commercial software company, and
very unlikely to be the stock high school math-club geeks of popular
press reports, a survey of SourceForge members conducted by Boston
Consulting Group (BCG) indicates.

These and other findings were revealed at last week's LinuxWorld
Conference in New York by BCG's Bob Wolf and Karim Lakhani, and OSDN's
Jeff "Hemos" Bates who collaborated on the project.

"What's impressive is that the picture of sixteen to twenty year-olds
working in their basement is not true," Bates observed. "They're
twenty-two to thirty- seven essentially, by and large working within a
corporate environment."

The chief motivations for donating time and effort to the open source
community are varied, but include professional advancement; the need for
mental stimulation; a personal belief that software ought to be open (not
necessarily free); a chance to acquire new skills or refine existing
ones; and practical needs for code which isn't commercially available.

Respondents were broken into clusters of 'believers', 'skill enhancers',
'fun seekers' and 'professionals'. Respondents classified as believers
indicate a strong commitment to the idea that software should be open;
skill enhancers overwhelmingly reported a desire to refine skills; fun
seekers were those most likely to seek mental stimulation; professionals
were those most interested in practical coding needed for a project, and
CV bulking.

However, these categories don't appear to be exclusive. That is, a 'fun
seeker' may well be employed as a commercial programmer.

Indeed, the great majority of respondents are employed in the field, so
it's reasonable to infer that a lot of them are getting less than the
desired amount of personal satisfaction and mental stimulation on the
job.

The two greatest motives reported were intellectual stimulation and skill
improvement; and the last thing motivating hackers appears to be any
desire to 'defeat' proprietary software.

Volunteers

Respondents reported devoting a great deal of time to open-source
projects. The mean contribution among respondents for all projects was a
hefty fourteen hours per week. Additionally, a large number of
respondents appealed to the creative nature of open development and
freedom from traditional corporate supervision as primary attractions.

No doubt this reflects the fairly universal desire among professionals to
ply their trade in circumstances which conform to their values. A doctor
may participate in Médecins sans Frontières, for example, because it
enables him to practice the sort of medicine that originally drew him to
the field. We see this all the time: a plastic surgeon sick of tightening
the gelatinous facial skin of blue-haired Manhattan matrons (however
necessary this may be to keep his Mercedes from the repo man) may find
himself happily practicing 'real' medicine in Asia or Africa for a month
or two each year, repairing the faces of needy children devastated by
accidents or birth defects.

It should be no surprise that programmers have their own set of work
values, albeit somewhat less humanitarian in nature, which a volunteer
program like the open source movement permits them to exercise.

Dream job

If we look at what respondents say they want from leaders in the open
source community, we see a picture of something quite unlike corporate
project management, and remarkably like the open-source model as it's
practiced. That is, there's a clear desire for 'space' for individual
creativity and initiative. Thus it would be reasonable view the open
source movement as, in part, an extension of the need for professional
programmers to break free of corporate paternalism and enjoy doing their
work in a more idealized environment.

We may take from the data some reassurance that the open source community
is chiefly a responsible group of experienced professionals, which is a
message the IT suits definitely need to get; but perhaps more
importantly, additional data like this might be accumulated and used to
adjust the corporate work environment to make it more appealing to
programmers, and make them, in turn, more productive. If a company would
exploit the way programmers like to work, it needs to forget about
we-so-hip window dressings like cappuccino makers and scooters, and look
more closely at how programmers work when they're not getting paid.

Surely the open source movement is an excellent ecological venue for
further research along such lines.