Researchers Study Motivations of Open-Source Programmers
phys.org
phys.org
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.
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!)
It's really quite interesting to see how it morphed over the years.
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]
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.
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.
"why would he do that?"