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

[Bruce Caron]

Prof. Neera Singh at U Toronto is working on the role of emotional
commitment (affect) as a feature of commoning, <
https://geography.utoronto.ca/profiles/6318/>.  I suspect her work on
community forests in India might also apply to open-source software.

bruce caron

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 12:24 PM jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Bruce Caron, PhD
Executive Director
New Media Studio
Santa Barbara, CA USA
http://www.nmri.org
http://cybersocialstructure.org/
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