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

[Christopher M. Kelty]

Much of the early initial work on Free Software, from c. 1990-2010 
was about motivation;  it was dominated by the law and economics 
approach on the one hand (Benkler's 'Coase's Penguin' article was 
the go-to read), and by various sui generis studies like Rishab 
Ghosh's Cooking Pot Markets... for many people it was a serious 
puzzle why anyone would do anything *without being paid* (!?)  The 
answer often turned out to be a version of what Bastien said here: 
to give back to the community. A few people turned to the 
literature on gift exchange in anthropology, which is, at least in 
Mauss, a very concise theory of reciprocity as the basis of a 
social bond, but I don't think that ever made much of a dent in 
the work of those who followed in studying the processes of 
maintaining free software (also, it's probably too high level for 
most basic concerns, but ought to be an important way to think 
about what maintenance is for in a general sense).

In any case, I think the original question here might be better 
formulated not just as "what motivates people to maintain a 
project" but maybe a version of "what are the limits on how long 
one can keep 'giving back to the community' before it fails as a 
motivation?"  Also, given all the other focus on how FLOSS 
communities in particular are not doing such a good job of 
'giving' equally to everyone in the first place, there is an 
opportunity to re-pose this old motivation question in very 
different terms than it was 20 years ago... (thinking here about 
ethical source licences esp.)

ck 



Don Goodman-Wilson <don at maintainerati.org> writes:

> 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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