Question for Coders

[jjcechva]

Well I'm writing a paper about Linux, Ubuntu, and Open Source, and I am pretty much done with it but I came here to ask this question, which I haven't been able to come up with a complete answer to:

Why do you dedicate time to supporting Ubuntu? ie. Why do (or people) spend so much time to writing millions of lines of code, or helping people with their Ubuntu problems/questions (kind of like this one...) when there is no profit involved?

[Hortinstein]

I have wondered about this same thing, and have read posts in the forums and even seen stuff on TV about open source, and I would say that the main reason is they develop a tool that they might need, and release it to the community free of charge, because they use other tools they have obtained free of charge.

Building on that linux is a totally customizable operating system, and I think that for a lot of businesses and people, having the power to add functionality is a big plus instead of dealing with pre set tools.

That is just my little 2 cents, but I guess the open source community is driven by a desire to innovate outside the box, which gives us great products like beryl, bittorrent (most clients and the original protocol), and other tools we use everyday

Here is an interesting thing i forgot to add
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=400938&highlight=supports

it talks about how the ubuntu team gets paid, it might help...also try looking at wikipedia for more ideas, since it itself is opensource and all the articles are written by people that share their information for free

[slimdog360]

Because they are nice people who like to share their creations with everyone.

[kanem]

Many coders get paid to do open source. The coders that write applications and don't get paid for it, they probably needed the app for themselves. Often someone will feel limited by the apps that currently exist. So they write their own. Since they weren't doing it for profit, but just to scratch their itch, they might as well let everyone have it.

So I guess what I'm saying is it's not completely altruistic. Most people who donate code wrote the code for themselves because they needed it, and later made it free.

[macogw]

Well, if you need a bit of code to make your own life easier, you write it, but you don't get paid. You were never expecting to get paid when you wrote that bit of code. Digital information (software, music, Gimp'd images) is unique in that, unlike material goods, no matter how many copies of something you produce, whether it's 1 or 1,000,000,000, it never costs you a penny. It doesn't cost you anything to distribute copies of the code over sourceforge (no server costs, even), so you don't lose any money on the deal, and you wouldn't have been making any in the first place. While one could argue the old "time is money" line, time is only money if you're "time wasting" would have otherwise been spent on something for which you get paid, but since you weren't going to pay yourself to write that code (I hope...that'd be weird), it doesn't even fit then.

As to why I answer questions on here:
I like reading the questions and responses because then I learn more about how stuff works and am better prepared in case I ever run into that same problem in the future. If I come across something that I *can* answer though, it doesn't cost me anything (even opportunity cost because I'd otherwise be chatting on AIM or hitting refresh on gmail 50 times) to volunteer my knowledge, so I do. I really like answering questions though (you should see me in class).

[YourSurrogateGod]

According to wiki, Linus Torvalds' contribution to the present day kernel is a mere 2%. Much of the other stuff came from other people. Also, many people actually get paid to write the code for linux that is sometimes released under the open source license (big corporations such as IBM, Novell, etc. play a bigger part than most realize.)

Also, if you ask me, it has more to do with showing off what you're capable of (which looks very nice on a resume) and having millions oggle at your 1337 c0d1ng sk1llz than some sort of altruistic goal. If you do something cool (i.e. make a new feature rich desktop environment) and post the video on youtube, you'll get countless accolades about what you're capable of.

[jeffc313]

Well I'm writing a paper about Linux, Ubuntu, and Open Source, and I am pretty much done with it but I came here to ask this question, which I haven't been able to come up with a complete answer to:

Why do you dedicate time to supporting Ubuntu? ie. Why do (or people) spend so much time to writing millions of lines of code, or helping people with their Ubuntu problems/questions (kind of like this one...) when there is no profit involved?

I am not a kernel programmer, not a ubuntu programmer, so i cant help you in that sense. But I am a developer over at camerahacking.com and I program for free to help people to
1) Fulfil my own curiosity. "can I do this?"
2) to learn more about programming
3) e-fame :lolflag:

[IYY]

I'm a coder. Here's why the GPL license is appealing for me:

1. I enjoy coding, and do it as a hobby. If it's something I had fun writing, I don't mind giving it away for free and give the source-code to the community as long as some company won't steal it and close the source. I wouldn't sell those fun little projects of mine anyway, there's not enough money in it to bother.

2. As I code, I learn the GNU/Linux system, and gain skills that later help me get great jobs coding not Free software, but not commercial software either. Remember that the largest job market for coders is in private applications for companies that are never sold to the public. Linux skills are very useful for such applications, and being familiar with Free code libraries is also very useful (because it is legal to use GPL code in those cases). Similarly, helping people with Ubuntu questions on these forums helps learn very valuable system administration skills, and the common problems/solutions.

3. It's like charity! I love doing nice things for people.

4. Free software has given me so much, I see it as my duty to give back.

[Hendrixski]

Granted everyone has their own reasons, I do it to better serve my customers, and because they pay me.

There's a really good book about it that I would recomend, I'm currently lending it to a friend. it's called "The sucess of open source" and it's by a political science professor who's not a developer. He studied WHY people code in Open source and put a lot of hours both paid and unpaid into such a system. What the social implications of it are etc. Another good book about WHY as well as how is "Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond, which is the book that historically made the Open Source community ask itself "who are we and why are we here", and helped us define oursleves.

The answers you are looking for are well documnted, hopefully those two books will help you.

[grte]

I'm pro-learning and anti-bother. I learn by coding, and trying to sell that code is a lot more of a bother than just giving it away.

[MattSMiddleton]

I think it's a lot about curiosity (as others have said) and also a lot about making a tool that you need, and realizing that this could grow from a simple tool that does one thing you need into a bigger, more complex tool that can do a lot of things you need but never could code yourself. It definitely depends on the person but I think that the two reasons mentioned above plus giving back can sum up a lot of peoples involvement in OSS

[macogw]

Oh, yeah, this is a meritocracy. We've all heard of aristocracy, democracy, monarchy, oligarchy...meritocracies mean the more merits you have, the better your rank. The better you hack, the more well-respected you are in the open source world. If you find some novel new way of making a computer do something neat and efficiently, that's a nice little hack, and you get props for doing it. Being the first to do something really NEAT with a computer (for instance, my boyfriend calls Ada Lovelace a Machine Goddess because she was the first coder). Demonstrating extreme technical expertise, like Brian Kernighan did when he helped write the Bible (The C Programming Language) and get Unix going (another of his Machine Gods, though I've heard other people call Kernighan a god as well), gets you higher rank and higher respect. It's like being the Sammy Davis Jr or Michael Jordan of code. Just the infamy is great.

[FoolsGold]

Cos it gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling to contribute for free. :)