[Themaintainers] Open Source Software: What makes maintenance something people do ?

[jan]

Hello Maintainers,

TL;DR: How are people socialized to continue to maintain (open source 
software)?

I wonder if you know any studies that analyze what makes developers 
continue to maintain a piece of code, often without pay. A lot of open 
source culture celebrates (libertarian) freedom, creating new solutions 
and avoiding obligations (at least according to Nafus, 2011 [1] ). 
Code/Software is provided "as is", so there is no written social or (or 
even legal) contract to NOT leave a project, yet people seem to go 
through a lot of pain to maintain old code or adapt old code to changing 
infrastructure. I thus wonder how and why they continue to maintain in 
the face that a lot of the openly celebrated activities are somewhere else.

Jan

[1]: ‘Patches don’t have gender’: What is not open in open source 
software,  Dawn Nafus, 2011 
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444811422887

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