I’ve never really thought of why people participate in the world of open source. Open source just always felt like part of the internet since both fit so well together. To be able to participate in a community of people working to complete a project because they found a reason to work on it for me just worked great with the mass connection the internet gives people. People are a part of hundreds of different communities on the internet and contribute to these communities in different ways. Open source just so happens to also embody that sense of community that can be created on the internet. If there was a community on the internet dedicated to promoting and contributing to anime-boyband-rap-battles, then I was certain there would be people willing to contribute to a much more reasonable, and helpful, open source project. My thoughts have always went to just accepting if something exists on the internet and never asking why or how. Yes, I just accepted there was a community of people promoting and contributing to anime-boyband-rap-battles, but I never thought why they ended up being created in the first place. For me, the internet just had the ability to connect people together so that these communities could be created. There are hundreds of open source projects that people contribute to the final project, but why?
ESR and the ideology that surrounds hackers does give me some different perspectives, or rather, the same perspective from a different angle. There are varying degrees of zealotry that people can feel to open source, from considering it their life to taking it up as more of a hobby. Also, there are people that participate in open source as a form of rebellion towards the commercial. These two aspects, anti-commercial and zealotry (rebellion and passion), are shown to be in varying degrees as motivation for people working within open source communities. It’s funny to see these parts of open source contributors emphasized since they seem to attribute to the idea that hackers can act and think much like artists. An open source project is like a group of artist-hackers getting together and contributing to a mural. Now, ESR continues on to go into more depth of the open source culture, describing both the role of reputation and how it’s a gift economy. The power of reputation makes sense in a gift economy. With a gift economy having social status on what you give away means that what becomes important is one’s reputation. By having a good reputation for giving things that are good and useful, your status can definitely be raised. In respect to the open source community, there rings some truth into this perspective. If you contribute good criticism, good code, and good participation to an open source project, you are likely to get more noticed. The more various amounts of open source projects you contribute to, you get a better reputation within the community. With the greater reputation comes a greater social status in the community, to the point your words have much more weight in the open source community. Not only this, but if you create your own open source project, you’re giving a chance to create a community of like-minded people, which also has a larger influence on people.
Then there are also the taboos that ESR lists as part of the open source community. I find the second and third point reasonable, but I disagree when if comes to the first point and forking. There have been forks of open source projects in the past for good reasons, and these forks aren’t usually frowned upon. I think the more accurate taboo is forking a project and acting like you’re doing something cool and innovative all yourself. If anything there is more a social pressure to not take other people’s hard work and code and write it off as your own work. Since contribution is important within the open source community, it only makes sense that giving people credit is considered important.
I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, hacker culture is very similar to that of the modern hipster culture today. The idea that hacker culture hates the idea of egotism is in correlation to the hacker culture being very “stick-it-to-the-man” culture. Mainstream culture consists of stereotypical egotism through the members higher up on the social ladder because they control more. So it makes sense that hipster culture, the hacker culture, chooses to be against that because of the egotism being more mainstream. If the open source hacking community has those who are anti-commercial, this makes sense because there tends to be a sense of egotism that comes with commercial. For me, participating in open source has always been because I feel motivated to participate in a community that I enjoy and can assist in however I can. When I don’t find too many holes in ESR’s description, I think it may be complicating thing, like trying to make parts sound more important, in regards to what the open source community is. If there is a bug, I want to help fix it and if I have an interest in the project, I want to help contribute to it because if something I can have motivation to work on it.
Hackers in the Bazaar 