Comments on: Signal and Meaning http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2010/02/28/signal-and-meaning/ Thu, 17 May 2012 20:31:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Wes Winham http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2010/02/28/signal-and-meaning/comment-page-1/#comment-267 Wes Winham Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:10:55 +0000 http://22ideastreet.com/blog/?p=944#comment-267 I think authors generally have a kind of inherit understanding of that. I doubt many would break it down to the signal level, but they want their stuff to be read just as much as they want to make a fat wad of cash. It's the kind of intrinsic motivation that can drive someone even though there's not a rational self-interest behind it. When people wonder how open source works and thrives, they give different answers. Some say that it's just a culture of scratching your own itch (Linux says this a lot). Others see it as idealogical (Stallman) and some kind of collectivist statement. From a business side, you can explain it when companies collaborate on non-core business functionality to cut costs for everyone involved and there's a lot of projects that could be seen as running on that level (linux). Then there's the argument that individuals contribute for the fame and rewards they'll get or for the skills they gain. While all of those arguments make sense and can add up to some decent motivation, I don't think it explains the one-off contributions to libraries you don't use at work. It doesn't explain while a .NET developer spends a weekend hacking on a ORM adapter for MongoDB and rails that they'll never get to use professionally. It doesn't explain why developers donate billions of dollars of time on projectfoo-dev mailings lists debating implementations and contributing patches that won't materially benefit them in the slightest. I think its your signal-creation motivation that drives open source in general. People want to do things, even tiny things, that change the world around them. I think authors generally have a kind of inherit understanding of that. I doubt many would break it down to the signal level, but they want their stuff to be read just as much as they want to make a fat wad of cash. It’s the kind of intrinsic motivation that can drive someone even though there’s not a rational self-interest behind it.

When people wonder how open source works and thrives, they give different answers. Some say that it’s just a culture of scratching your own itch (Linux says this a lot). Others see it as idealogical (Stallman) and some kind of collectivist statement. From a business side, you can explain it when companies collaborate on non-core business functionality to cut costs for everyone involved and there’s a lot of projects that could be seen as running on that level (linux). Then there’s the argument that individuals contribute for the fame and rewards they’ll get or for the skills they gain.

While all of those arguments make sense and can add up to some decent motivation, I don’t think it explains the one-off contributions to libraries you don’t use at work. It doesn’t explain while a .NET developer spends a weekend hacking on a ORM adapter for MongoDB and rails that they’ll never get to use professionally. It doesn’t explain why developers donate billions of dollars of time on projectfoo-dev mailings lists debating implementations and contributing patches that won’t materially benefit them in the slightest. I think its your signal-creation motivation that drives open source in general. People want to do things, even tiny things, that change the world around them.

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