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

[Andrew Russell]

Atul Pokharel at NYU has been working on the subject of why people *stop* maintaining things.  I’m copying him here in case he wants to weigh in (I believe he’s on this list, also).  

His terrific work spans from irrigation canals to open source software, and I know he’s spent a lot of time thinking about these questions of motivation, fairness, and the moral dimensions of maintenance (and commons) more generally. See for example https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2802653 <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2802653>. 

Andy


> On Aug 25, 2020, at 2:56 AM, Don Goodman-Wilson <don at maintainerati.org> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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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