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

[James Howison]

Possibly useful:

Trainer, E. H., Chaihirunkarn, C., Kalyanasundaram, A., & Herbsleb, J. D.
(2015). From Personal Tool to Community Resource: What’s the Extra Work and
Who Will Do It? Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer
Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 417–430.
https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675172

Although you are specifically asking about continuation motivations, rather
than initial.  I don't know of specific work on that, but I think it's a
particularly interesting question, would love to know if anyone has a study
that breaks out continuation (I guess a comparison between contributions in
years 1-3 and beyond?).  I think it would be crucial to break out
motivations for those using the software themselves (esp. enabling revenue)
vs those maintaining software they don't use anymore.

There is a somewhat dated (but possibly still useful) summary of motivation
research (together with a discussion of the importance of weighting stated
motivations by actual time contributed, rather than laundry lists) in

Crowston, K., Wei, K., Howison, J., & Wiggins, A. (2012). Free (Libre) Open
Source Software Development: What We Know and What We Do Not Know. *ACM
Computing Surveys*, *44*(2), Article 7.
https://doi.org/10.1145/2089125.2089127

James Howison

Associate Professor
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
http://james.howison.name


On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 2:09 AM Bastien <bzg at bzg.fr> wrote:

> jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > I thus wonder how and why they continue to maintain in the face that
> > a lot of the openly celebrated activities are somewhere else.
>
> In my case (being a FLOSS maintainer for ~10 years), my motivation
> evolved from
>
> (1) a moral sense of giving back to other FLOSS maintainers
> (2) the mere fun of being a maintainer (and decide things)
> (3) a certain sense of pride
>
> to
>
> (1) the moral sense of giving back (still important)
> (2) the moral sense of social commitment to the community
>
> --
>  Bastien
> _______________________________________________
> Themaintainers mailing list
> Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
> https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/listinfo/themaintainers
> >> This message is from an external sender. Learn more about why this <<
> >> matters at https://links.utexas.edu/rtyclf.                        <<
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20200824/db474dc5/attachment.html>