For me, it's mostly avoiding the hassle of commercializing something. If I'm never going to try to sell it, I might as well give away the source. Also, there's

For me, it's mostly avoiding the hassle of commercializing something. If I'm never going to try to sell it, I might as well give away the source. Also, there's not really much choice when a lot of what you do is in perl or ruby or ... -- just about anything but c/c++. How I got started is another story. I switched to linux because windows drove me crazy. Then Gnome and KDE drove me crazy. Then xfce drove me crazy. It became apparent that I had very specific needs, and nothing available was going to fill them. So, I chose something close to what I wanted (fluxbox) and started fixing things. Thus, I guess you could say I started because I'm picky.