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I think the answer is yes, but with a huge caveat: incentives must be build around the social norms that made open source successful in the first place. Incenti
by freshhawk 13y ago
I think the answer is yes, but with a huge caveat: incentives must be build around the social norms that made open source successful in the first place. Incentives built on financial norms would be disastrous and act as strong disincentives instead. Humans are weird, and we act differently when operating under financial norms than we do under social norms. Dan Ariely explains this quite nicely in a lot of his talks, you should google it if you haven't seen it.
This is why I'm really skeptical of things like gittip or other "we'll pay you pennies to spend hours of your life building open source projects" approaches.
I much more excited by the cultural shift that seems to be happening around "my github account is my resume". It's not just a "write open source as resume padding to get a better job" thing, it's an increase in the amount of social capital resulting from contribution to open source. Basically if people find out I contribute to a "good" open source project more people care and the people who care, care more than they used to.
I think this is an excellent incentive scheme. A popular open source project cannot generate enough revenue to pay me what my contribution is worth so it's impossible for them to incentivize me with money. But if my reputation is increased because my contribution is recognized and my peers think more of me, my ideas are more easily heard and my financial career path opportunities are expanded because of that reputation then I am highly motivated to contribute.
I think there's a big place for the patronage/sponsorship model as well (and the incentives to be a patron are quite similar), especially for getting the necessary but boring/less sexy things done. It can also push back, in one way, against the problem of reputation based incentives undervaluing boring but high-value work.
- jackaltman 13y agoRight - the incentive needs to be consistent with the platform; this is why you bring a dinner host a bottle of wine instead of the equivalent amount of cash.
- AJ007 13y agoWould it be reasonable for a developer to ask, I want to devote 1 year of my time to open source project X, please fund me on Kickstarter to accomplish Y & Z?
- indrax 13y agoYes. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...
- freshhawk 13y agoI like the kickstarter model but it does put things in the world of financial norms. How much work are you going to put in to an open source project when the other guy working on it is getting paid by kickstarter money? That said it's a great way to let people actually get what they want most from a project by putting something on the line to make it happen. For single person projects or small teams who are all getting funded I think it's nearly perfect. Certainly very exciting. The only thing worrying is that it's much more likely for those funded projects to stop development when the money stops. Who knows if that will be an actual problem or not. For larger projects, when everyone can't get paid from the pot, it's a bit tricky. I'm pretty sure that we'll see some successful projects completely implode from the internal arguments and demotivation resulting from allocating crowdfunded money. Anyway, I could dream up fun scenarios all day but it's just predicting the future so it's probably all wrong. I think kickstarter type models are really promising for all sorts of things so people should go for it. One thing to always keep in mind though: A human will happily do something for free for all sorts of reasons, if you start paying them they will be even happier for a while, then will normalize to just as happy as before. If you stop paying them they will never go back to being happy doing that thing for free.