We are two Swedish students conducting a research for a masters’ thesis to find out what motivates developers in open source projects. It will be very important for us and we would really appreciate if you could take some time to fill out our survey. The survey only takes around 3-5 minutes to fill out. Again, thank you for your efforts.
A couple of years ago I received an email soliciting the filling out of forms for a similar endeavour. It appears that the governments and major corporates want to know why the best brains are either working for themselves or for Open Source community projects and would like to make sure the current govt printed currency based economy still stays relevant by “addressing” such reasons as one may have in contributing the best for open use.
This is a topic of particular interest to me at the moment as I am currently part of the launch of an open-source community and am drawing a lot of inspiration from the openEMR forum. I asked the very same question to some of our current developers and they gave several reasons they sought out open-source communities:
Rubbing shoulders with the best developers they could find was a great learning experience for them.
They spoke of the satisfaction they get from having their code implemented in to a project. It meant that their work had been reviewed and accepted by their peers, ipso facto, they were appreciated.
Open-source projects allowed them to be recognized for their technical expertise, not dedication to a single organization.
Seeking technical challenges; working for profit organizations could often become mundane and dis-engaging. It is different in open source projects where a developer works on projects that interest them.
A real sense of community - The people are very welcoming and intelligent. This makes new-comers feel that they are part of a healthy community which compels them do things like write documentation, help others with problems or just fix documentation typos in-order to be part of such a community.
We also have developers many different backgrounds. Many of them have spent considerable time in large companies such as Microsoft but conversely many of them have spent the bulk of their time in open-source on projects such as OpenClinica and OpenXdata.
On a side-note if anyone is interested in taking a look at the community we are building you can find it here: ClinCapture User and Developer Community Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.