Why Hackers Do It

If you've ever wondered what makes hackers (not crackers) tick, you can relax: somebody has now submitted a doctoral thesis on the subject (in German) to give us an academically-rigorous answer.

It has as its title "Fun and software development: on the motivation of open source programmers," and includes, in an appendix, an email from RMS, whom the doctorand unwisely addressed as an "open source developer". To which Stallman inevitably (and rightly) replied:

Thank you, but I do not consider myself an ’open source developer’, and I don’t like my work to be described as ’open source’.

My work is free software (freie Software, logiciel libre).

One result, noted by Heise Online, is particularly striking:

Only about half the programming work is thus undertaken by the developers in their free time; for 42 percent (in temporal terms) of their engagement with open source the programmers are being remunerated -- an astonishingly large percentage. On this point the author of the dissertation Benno Luthiger Stoll remarks that this figure is likely to be even higher when the big picture is taken into account: The developers most likely to be paid are those working for large open-source projects; projects that in many cases have their own project infrastructure, he notes. Those active open-source programmers questioned, however, had come from Sourceforge, Savannah and Berlios, which in general tended to host less elaborate projects, he adds.

Happily, it also seems that

When compared with some 110 developers working for Swiss software companies, those engaged in open-source projects were seen to have more fun.

But maybe Swiss software companies are particularly boring.