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

[Don Goodman-Wilson]

I’m not aware of any studies here either, but I find myself also deeply intrigued by your question. I’m going to ask around and see if anything turns up. There may be a research opportunity here!

Don GOODMAN-WILSON
Board, Maintainerati Foundation

> On 24 Aug 2020, at 17:17, James Howison <jhowison at ischool.utexas.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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 &#38; Social Computing, 417–430. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675172 <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 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2089125.2089127>
> 
> James Howison
> 
> Associate Professor
> School of Information
> University of Texas at Austin
> http://james.howison.name <http://james.howison.name/>
> 
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 2:09 AM Bastien <bzg at bzg.fr <mailto:bzg at bzg.fr>> wrote:
> jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com <mailto: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
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