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Comment by volkk | Hacker News Reader

all good points. i also think what really pushes a lot of developers to do open source, and bear with me for the unpopular opinion--is ego. they love having followers, and a voice on twitter with some open source badge on their profile page. it's in a way a status symbol of "i did this important thing that a lot of people rely on, im pretty important." i highly doubt that even 5% of contributors are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or the community.

you can sort of see evidence of this within repositories filled with smug comments within the issues or pull requests

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I’d say ego is less than 10%, and the quiet, achieving minority are not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or love for the community, they are doing it because it’s a love of their craft.

Once you see something that you have built, running at thousands of operations a second for years, once it’s running smoothly and all the bugs and edge cases have been smoothed out. Watching the machine dance, visualising the data structures in your mind - and algorithms running on them. Thinking about state changes, loops and execution, and watching it all running in a beautiful symphony of logic : there’s really no other feeling of joy and appreciation of beauty. I love being a programmer, and I suspect the majority of open source contributors are like this.

The snide comments and unhelpful github messages are the minority in my experience, especially with more mature products (kernel development, sys ops tools etc)

Ego strokes is just one form of non-monetary compensation. OSS is not alone in being the product of voluntary work. Lots of worthwhile civic, charitable, communal and religious endeavors rely on volunteer labor which is compensated through recognition, friendships, power trips, reciprocal benefits, satisfaction of giving back, etc. The power of non-monetary compensation should not be underestimated, even in the context of paid work.

On the other hand, software maintenance is a category of work that tends to be poorly compensated even in the case of proprietary corporate software. So it is no shock that OSS maintenance also is poorly compensated either monetarily or non-monetarily.

This kind of ego satisfaction is not a necessarily bad force, and is responsible for many of the advancements in world history. Why did guys like Newton or Salk publish their work instead of profit from it in secret? Because there is more to life than money. Because there is the satisfaction of knowing tour work has changed the world. Because they wanted their names to ring out in the annals of history, be carved into the tops of marble columns, etc.

It basically boils down to whether you think people are really being altruistic, or whether it's simply reciprocal altruism.

sure-- but the main difference is that the community pretends to be super altruistic under the guise of doing god's work for the good of all developers. it comes off as super fake. at least thats sort of the vibe i get from it. i also dont have a huge sample size of repos so maybe im talking mostly out of my ass in this case

i would honestly rather it all be backed by corps and people get paid for it without any hints of "benevolent dictators"

I agree that it's a thing, aside from some examples I have in mind, like for example, the original authors of OpenSSL (originally SSLeay) didn't really ask for any credit as far as I know. I think you might be overestimating the number of people who do a lot of self-promotion simply because those people are going to be more visible. There are plenty of people who work on important things and don't really do a lot of marketing or self-promo.

> i would honestly rather it all be backed by corps and people get paid for it without any hints of "benevolent dictators"

Well don't use opensource software then, go buy it... It's your choice...

Just like it's the choice of a developer to give away something they made for free...

You mean backed by red-hat under the benevolent hand of Ulrich Drepper?

For me, it's the somewhat selfish but defensible idea that open source is a good way to get experience with technologies that I don't get to use in my day job. I get some amount of pride in seeing my name in release notes etc but that is about it, I don't do Twitter, don't have followers, and am not high-profile in any way.

I don't think this is fundamentally different from being proud of your importance as measured by salary. Granted a salary might be a more accurate measurement.

Nonsense. Salary is an indicator of utilized leverage, not of quality. Plenty of software devs could easily put themselves out of business, and not be sure what to work on next, without capturing all of the value they generate.

Maybe just community? Building something useful to oneself, releasing it to find it solves others' problems, seeing one's work have a broad benefit, collaborating with others to make it better, etc. Not sure if this is just a positive spin of your "ego" hypothesis, but my gut tells me that it's a categorically distinct motivation.

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